It's magnificent, but it's nothing to do with war

So what do you think? About the war, I mean. If they've heard of you, if you're remotely a public figure, the papers ring you up. What do you think? As though your thoughts on a war against Iraq are going to be more interesting by virtue of the fact that they've got your number.

For it or against it?

I see that pop stars are standing out against it. Distinguished architects have recently written to this newspaper in a body, against it. I have a feeling I glimpsed footage last week of a bunch of actors standing out by lying down against it.

What do I think? I think my thoughts are about as worthless as anybody else's. And I don't think thought's the word for what we're doing. If we were thinking, wouldn't we be thinking more variously, in accordance with the variety of our capacity to think? I don't think saying that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction that pose a threat to the free world is thought. And I don't think saying he hasn't is thought either. If truth is the first casualty of war, then cliché is the spoils. It's bad for us, I think, all to be mouthing off about weapons of mass destruction, and giving the inspectors time, and Iraq's being, or not being, in "material breach" – each man sounding like the next, and not even blushing in the act.

At least apologise. Look, I get my thoughts from Newsnight which gets its from the Today programme which gets its from Question Time which gets its from Newsnight, so ignore me. Of thought, in any sense of the word that matters, of thought, as in labour of the mind or as in the fruit of sustained mental effort, I don't have a scintilla, but then neither do you. However, I'll swap opinions with you if you like, though we are probably identical in those as well.

That we have a duty to stop a dictator if his threat is imminent, or a war if it is irresponsible, I don't doubt. But only time will tell whether we were right about either. If we don't fight Saddam and he nukes us as a consequence, we will be proved wrong to have held back. If we do fight Saddam Hussein and find warehouses full of ricin-impregnated umbrella tips, we will be proved right to have gone in. If we fight and don't find ricin-impregnated umbrella tips, but he nukes us anyway, we will be proved to have been both right and wrong. Which I always reckon, on balance, is about as good as we can hope to achieve.

Is that enough politics?

The point of my being a novelist, like the point of an architect being an architect and an actor an actor (there is no point in a pop star being a pop star), is that I perceive the world differently to a statesman or the anchorman of a current affairs programme. Ask yourself why Newsnight and the Today programme and Question Time go over all embarrassed, look silly, lose the plot, shrug their shoulders, make facetious comments or square up like prize-fighters the moment they are called on to address anything loosely referred to as "the arts". It is because to a current affairs person, art is an alien discourse. So alien was art to Jeremy Paxman throughout his stewardship of Start the Week, he couldn't think of anything to do with it but kick it.

I say this without complaint. Each to his own. The current affairs man talks weapons of mass destruction; the arts man "verisimilitude caught from the penetralium of mystery". But those of us who are arts men have a duty to remember who's good at what, and what we're for.

And as chance would have it – for you will have spotted that my subject this week is not war at all – art has laid before us, at this very hour, when we are most in need, a supreme example of the business it is about, its aloofness from the expression of mere opinion, its apprehension of the strange grandeur of human existence, not separate from politics and social change, but governed by laws and necessities that neither social nor political thinking, even when it deserves the name of thought, can fathom. I am talking, of course, of Stephen Poliakoff's The Lost Prince, the first part of which was shown, to general acclaim, on BBC1 last Sunday, though not, I have to say, to acclaim enough. For if there has been a greater work of the imagination conceived for television ever, I challenge you to name it.

Tolstoyan it was, not only in the breadth of its ambitions, but in the confident magnanimity of its sympathies. I should say it was Dickensian as well, though that is partly what we mean – partly what I mean anyway – by Tolstoyan. Comedy at the highest level, too deep for mere mirth, but filled with a marvellous appreciation of the absurd, the cruel, the beautiful magniloquence of our natures. Let every costume drama bow its head: The Lost Prince revelled in costume, not as prop or backdrop or period authenticity, not to show off its needlework or research, but as the expression of the exquisite and deluded vanity of man, proud man, himself. In their doomed endeavour to escape the mundane normalities of life, Poliakoff's crowned heads spoke to us from the very heart of humanity.

Epileptic and sweetly out of tune, like a baby Hamlet, the lost prince was their poet, enlivened to the point of madness by the colour and inordinacy of what he saw, by the gorgeous strangeness of the pageant, by all the teeming wonders of the breathing world. And by the terrifying extravagance of animal vitality no less, so that when his encounter with his father's demoniacal parrot felled him, we felt that, Blake-like, he had stared into the fires and seen the immortal framing hand.

Which is what artists are for, and why it is of no interest what they think about Iraq.