Alexei Sayle: Show George some tough love, Tony

So far I've had a good war : I have felt myself politically reinvigorated by the struggle to stop the invasion, my shares in the British Fragmentation Grenade and Needle Sharp Flesh Ripping Shrapnel Corporation have gone through the roof, and I'm getting paid for this article.

For me the strangest part of the last few months has been that brief heady period when my anti-imperialist, anti-US opinions were also the opinions of the majority. That's never happened to me before and it took some getting used to.

I'm convinced that the popularity of the anti-war cause has been the reason why several liberal columnists have taken up bizarre militaristic stances. After a lifetime of unpopularity, probably going back to the playground, they have become comfortable with contrariness and can't take the idea of people agreeing with them, so they have panicked and felt forced to become boosters for the bellicose Mister Blair.

One of the arguments advanced by pro-invasion commentators and columnists for our involvement in this illegitimate adventure is that Tony Blair, while acting alongside George W Bush, is able to play the part of a restraining influence on the US President's belligerent, unilateralist inclinations: but is this true and is it possible?

Well I don't bleeding know, but like all columnists I'm prepared to take a wild, prejudiced, uninformed guess and say... no. Actually, for once I do have some semblance of a rationale for my position. I would like to look at the situation not in terms of politics or strategy but instead in terms of the two personalities involved, Bush and Blair.

Now it is an undisputed fact that George W Bush is an addict: he has admitted to being an abusive user of both alcohol and cocaine until his forties. The way he has supposedly dealt with his multiple addictions is by becoming a fundamentalist Christian. Has this brought him serenity? Apparently not – unless serenity consists solely in having a stupid smirk on your face at all times.

In his recent book The Right Man – The Surprise Presidency of George W Bush, David Frum, the former speechwriter who helped to devise the "axis of evil" speech, reveals President Bush, despite his affable public image (and his fake folksy Texas accent when he is entirely the product of an Ivy League East Coast environment), to be an acid-tongued, tightly-wound man.

Frum writes: "In private Bush was not the easy, genial man he was in public. Close up one saw a man keeping a tight grip on himself." Even the President's Christian faith "often "seemed at odds with his sharp and competitive character".

President Bush is marked by his alcoholic youth; his efforts to control his darker side have left him "a man of fierce anger".

What all this tells me is that George Bush is what is known as a "dry drunk": this is a person who has stopped drinking themselves to death by employing sheer force of will, but who has not addressed the feelings of rage, inadequacy, jealousy, pain that caused them to want to drink themselves to death in the first place.

Thus every day becomes a desperate struggle to stop themselves reaching for a drink. Because they are not at peace, this inner turmoil leads them to be extremely erratic in their behaviour, argumentative and volatile. It is almost certain that their addiction will break out in some other form: the dry drunk will become hooked on other things to try to alter their mood, such as extreme exercise, frantic shopping, frenzied sexual encounters, rabid religiosity or excessive military adventurism and imperialistic expansionism. What we see in George W Bush is a man with the classic untreated addict's profile, who is hanging on to his sobriety like grim death but is unstable, constantly angry and looking to "fix" himself with things outside himself.

If we look at the nation that President Bush leads, it also behaves in many ways like an addict. The United States is a gigantic John Candy of a country, straining its oversized elasticated pants from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The country is addicted to more or less everything, constantly craving greater and greater quantities of petrol, electricity, pointless sports, empty patriotism, fatty hormone-crammed meat, gigantic pedestrian-crushing four-wheel drive trucks, ever more baseball caps with nonsense written on them and unquestioning obedience from every nation on the planet.

And if we take a look at George W Bush's bestest Arab-bombing buddy in all the world, Ariel Sharon – well there's a morbidly obese fatty suffering from an out-of-control addictive eating disorder if ever I've seen one.

So where does Tony Blair, Bush's second-best mate, fit into all this? He's not an addict, I'll give him that: no he is something creepier – he's the "enabler". He's similar to the feeder cramming hamburgers into his 40-stone wife in order to try to control her for his own perverse pleasure; he's the one saying, "Well, I'll buy you the crack this time, but if you crash the car into another bus queue I'll be really cross."

Perhaps Blair genuinely thinks that by going along with Bush he can contain him, but if so he's wrong: all studies show that the best way to deal with an addict is to detach from them and stop helping them to use their drug of choice. You have to to say to them, "We love you, but what you are doing is wrong and we can't go along with it." So, Tony, show George some tough love and stop feeding his 100-soldier a day habit.

Alexei Sayle's novel 'Overtaken'' is published on 1 September by Sceptre