Peter Oborne, the presenter of Channel 4’s Dispatches: Iraq — The Reckoning, leaves you with the distinct impression that if someone in authority in Washington or London had only thought to ask him before invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein, we might well not be in the poopy mess we are in. But what gives Oborne his charm is that he manages to convey this message without the sanctimoniousness of, say, a John Pilger, or a Michael Moore, or even a Tony Benn.

Like many artful polemicists, Oborne has that knack of behaving as if interviewees with whose views he disagrees are somehow lying to him, while those whom he thinks understand (as he does) the genuine cause of a problem are given a generous platform to echo his own misgivings.

The reason Oborne gets away with this is a questioning intelligence, his willingness to get on a plane to Iraq and scare himself in person, and his lack of smugness. Wait, does that give the impression that he bites his tongue, or minces his words? Then I’ve misled you.

To Oborne, invading Iraq was “the greatest foreign policy disaster since Munich. And our Government has reacted in precisely the same way: by going into denial. Denial about the role our troops are really playing in Iraq. Denial about the true nature of the emerging Iraqi state. Above all, we’re in denial about the fact that the invasion of Iraq, as conceived by President Bush and Tony Blair, has failed.”

To his credit, Oborne somehow manages to make you take him seriously even when he is telling you things like this while wandering around Iraq’s dicier quarters wearing his little blue protective helmet, which makes it look like he has an awkward navy pimple on his head. Also endearing is Oborne’s habit of addressing us through eyes like slits, presumably to shield them from the Iraqi sun; though it can occasionally look like he’s just very short-sighted, and trying to locate the precise position of the TV camera he is supposed to be addressing.

Oborne’s contention is that nobody in Washington or London — at any rate, nobody in power — seemed to realise what the war would unleash. Differences between America’s State Department and the Pentagon, combined with George Bush’s reluctance to dirty his hands with details, amount, says Oborne, to “criminal incompetence that makes one want to cry”.

Not that Blair gets off any more lightly. Oborne visits academics who shared their insights with Blair before he plumped for war — including Dr Toby Dodge, a senior fellow of Imperial College, who warned the government that invading Iraq would result in a “huge, generation-long burden” — but whose reservations were brushed away; perhaps on the ground that they were academics who knew the political price of everything, and the value of nothing.

Most breathtaking of all, in Oborne’s opinion, is how, by invading Iraq, Bush and Blair have managed to pull off an almost unimaginable trick: they have taken two former sworn enemies, Iran and Iraq, and thrown them into each other’s arms, thereby manufacturing a genuine “Axis of Evil” that had hitherto existed only in the slick rhetoric of Bush’s speechwriters.

“It’s time,” Oborne concludes, “for us to leave. It’s the Iraqis who will decide the future of their country, and it’s not going to be the future we thought.” What wins you over is that he is quite untroubled by the thought that neither Bush nor Blair asked for his opinion on the matter, and are as likely to act on it as Charles Clarke is to be voted Mister Universe.

The world also took an unhelpful turn as far as the documentary Prince Eddy: The King We Never Had (Channel 4) was concerned, only this time it was England that was made to suffer.

The early death of Queen Victoria’s oldest grandson, Eddy, left the throne to his more remote younger brother, who became George V. Had Eddy become king, says his biographer, Andrew Cook, “history would have been very different . . . Eddy would have responded naturally to the British public, and the Royal Family we have today would be a very different one.”

Not that Eddy escaped criticism. Since his death he has been accused, on no ostensible evidence, of having been Jack the Ripper. But during his lifetime, the worst that anyone could apparently find to say of him was that he was “slow, self-indulgent, heedless and not punctual”. Most of the current royals would whoop if that were the worst anyone said of them.

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