THE NHS is always good for a laugh. When I was a boy the local cinemas - bug hutches - in downtown Leeds were packed for Doctor in the House and the first of the Carry on Nurse films.

The biggest giggle was at the pompous consultant surgeon Sir Lancelot Spratt who used to bully the junior doctors while the nurses did the stand-by-your-beds bit.

A generation later, Monty Python carried on (so to speak) this great tradition in their film, The Meaning of Life. By this time the authority figure mocked for his pomposity was not the great surgeon but the Administrator.

The NHS is still good for a laugh.

Did you see the TV pictures over the weekend of Mr Blair visiting a ward and shaking hands with some nurses as part of his latest smoke-and-mirrors initiative to convince us that the NHS is not a shambles but "the envy of the world"? If Blair had gone in for realism instead of sentimentality, he wouldn't have been filmed talking to nurses but to bureaucrats. These are the personnel increased five-fold during the lifetime of his Government.

And the achievement? Precisely nothing.

SO now it is officially confirmed that Tessa Jowell has been excluded from Cabinet meetings to discuss Iran these last three years - because her husband has reportedly been involved in a plan to sell civilian airlines to that aggressive dictatorship. Not military aircraft, you understand. Just passenger planes. And we know that passenger planes are perfectly harmless, don't we?

I don't know whether the accusation against Ms Jowell's husband is true, but there is enough disquiet in Government circles to ban Tessa from the Cabinet table. This is outrageous.

There is a tradition in British government called "collective responsibility" in which the Ministers of the Crown discuss and pronounce with one voice.

You can't have a functioning Cabinet when one of its members is excluded.

Whatever other doubts may have been expressed about the suitability of Ms Jowell for high office, this anomaly should never have arisen. If there were questions over her husband's involvement with a dodgy foreign government, these questions should have been answered or she should have resigned.

I do apologise for banging on about Iran. I have a lot of sympathy with the notion that to worry about far-flung foreign parts while remaining sublimely ignorant about what's going on under your nose is the first sign of madness. And anyhow people don't want to read articles about nasty rumours of war. Besides there is this idiotic supposition that if you say war is likely you're a warmonger.

But don't listen to me. Here's what Niall Ferguson, one of the world's foremost historians, wrote last Sunday: "The USA is going to ask the UN to impose sanctions if Iran does not halt its programme of uranium enrichment.

The other permanent members of the UN won't agree. And then? Well, when those missiles slam into the Iranian nuclear facilities, don't say I didn't warn you".

I repeat: the world is facing its worst crisis since Kennedy versus Khrushchev over Cuba.