Last month Australia was graced with a visit from ‘mad’ Melanie Phillips, the British columnist most recently famous for her book Londonistan: How Britain is Building a Terror State from Within.  It argues that contemporary Britain — with a Muslim population of 4%, a tiny minority of whom are fundamental Islamists — is in the same state as Germany in 1932 on the eve of a Nazi-style takeover.

Phillips began her career as a hard leftist, writing for the Guardian and backing the Labour Party’s socialist platform during the 1982 split with the centrist SDP. In recent years, she’s transferred that fervency to the right without pausing for breath. She’s picked up all the usual baggage — she not only doubts global warming (of course), but also evolution. She’s caused immense damage by backing the campaign against the ‘triple jab’ MMR vaccine (on the discredited grounds that it causes autism) which has caused rates of deadly childhood rubella to rise in the UK —  unprecedentedly for a Western country. She is, in other words, the epitome of the all-encompassing irrationalism that has lately gripped the political right.

And so, it was inevitable that she would still be spruiking the idea of WMDs in Iraq. Even better, in a recent article she’s found the bloke who found them. He’s Dave Gaubutz, ex-USAF investigations officer who claims that in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 invasion he was taken to three sites of bunkers where, the guide told him Saddam had hidden chemical and biological missiles (and tried to sell him fragments of the one true cross). They had gone by the time Gaubatz got there, of course, but you could tell from these holes in the ground that “something important had been there”.

What did Saddam do with these weapons, instead of using them? He dug them up and sent them to Syria — with help from the Russians, who presumably want nothing more than chem-bio missile stocks in neighbouring Islamic states.

Why didn’t these incriminating, erm, holes in the ground get discovered? Because, despite the fact that the US, post-invasion, practically cavity-searched every Iraqi for WMDs, “the search for WMDs was focused on the north”.

Compelling stuff, but before you go digging the shelter you’d better note, as recorded at Leftwrites, that Gaubatz runs a group with the Woody Allenesque title of Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), which is mapping the location of every Muslim school in America. SANE ain’t slow — before the smoke had cleared it had a bizarre 2000-word essay trying to link the Virginia shootings with America’s alleged unpreparedness for jihad.

Great stuff. Hurry back, Mad Mel. Australia needs laughter.