Chaos 3, Law and Order Nil

Several years ago - just before Prince William started his A-levels - a friendly neighbour heard our burglar alarm going off. She went round to the back of the house and found the doors to the living room open. Inside, on the carpet, she could see a jemmy. No doubt about a plan of action. Retreat. Call the police. Call my wife at work.

Jean was back in 40 minutes. Together, she and the neighbour scoured the house, saw what was missing, and waited. Call 999 again. Still no police. The neighbour went home. My wife made a cup of tea. Two hours trundled by. And then the burglar alarm next door - on the other side - began shrilling, too.

As my wife went into the street to look, a man carrying a television came out of next door's side gate. "Excuse me," Jean said, with a politeness that made the words sound incongruous even as they passed her lips, "I think you may have just broken into my home." The man, clutching TV to chest, began to walk away - pursued by irate wife shouting: "Stop, thief!" Nobody came to help. Cars swept by. The human caravan went faster and faster - until the man dropped the television in the gutter and did a runner, sprinting into the distance. There was still no sign of Scotland Yard's finest, nor would there be for another hour-and-a-half.

Which brings us, inescapably, to the night of Wills's revelry at Windsor Castle, and to the comedic mock Arab who triggered seven unheeded alarms and starred in five unnoticed videos while the cops did sweet nothing - and thus to the wilder shores of human lethargy, confusion and ineptitude.

Do the police actually answer alarms now? Or watch screens showing anything other than The Bill? They send you automatic victim letters offering counselling in case of possible distress. ("Dear Prince or Madam... ") After false alarms their computer churns out single sheets threatening not to respond again; assuming they responded in the first place. But what happens, really happens, when the bell rings? Is anybody home?

The goodish news, perhaps, is one of Labour egalitarian triumph after six years in office. Now the royals get the same treatment as the rest of us. The more nuanced news - oft repeated, always soon forgotten - is how easily chaos stalks the length and breadth of human affairs.

Chaos has just enjoyed another bumper week. Out go the lights from Manhattan to Buffalo, presumably as some kind of bizarre Bushie reassurance to the people of Mosul and Baghdad. Brothers, you are not alone. We can't fix our own damned electrics, let alone yours. Up in smoke - at least at the report stage - go tens of millions of pounds' investment in Yarl's Wood, the detention centre without a sprinkler system, run by Group 4, the groupies one QC calls a "national laughing stock". Down the tubes - with maximum, ludicrous publicity - goes an "international arms dealer" who bought his kit from Russia's internal security service and sold it to the FBI. Or maybe that was Aaron Barschak...

But Windsor makes the case most starkly. Here is a royal birthday party with the highest of gossip column profiles (the sort of thing for which Osama bin Laden might read Nigel Dempster). Yet there is no communicated security plan. The chief inspector pushes off home half an hour before the revels begin. Thames Valley police, guarding the castle walls, can't rustle up a car to take Barschak to the nick. A 28-point inquiry recommends having a few more blokes around next time and having them trained. It is a shambles. Even Sir John Stevens (David Blunkett's least favourite top cop) can do nothing but grovel: "We must be grateful it was an attention-seeker, not an intruder with more sinister purposes." Indeed, how true.

Don't stop there, though. Make a few modest and necessary connections. The police force charged with keeping Prince William safe for posterity and a jug of Pimm's is the same force issuing awful warnings about terrorism. The FBI nabbing Hemant Lakhani after 20 expensive, drawn-out months stands on America's parallel front line. A Group 4 prison, upon request, will doubtless welcome all-comers.

We are not, in sum, talking about a world neatly divided between efficiency and imbecility. We live in a world where the two perpetually conjoin. And that, so far, is the missing ingredient from the week's other great inquiry and pending report.

Who needs conspiracy theories when there is no evident conspiracy, just bumbling and back-covering in true chaos mode? You can get lost in this jungle of foreground and forget the chaotic background of revealed reality.

Dr David Kelly didn't doubt that there were weapons of mass destruction; he just thought there were fewer of them, less threatening and less ready than legend. The upper echelons of MI6 didn't agree: they produced - and signed off - on documents of a rather more frightening nature. Messrs Blair, Hoon and Campbell, perhaps, were genuinely scared on behalf of Joe Public (or moved by still more shuddersome dossiers from the CIA).

But, it seems, they were all up the creek. Even Dr Kelly. There were no such weapons left. The supposedly macabre scientist they called "Dr Germ" was probably suffering from hay fever. The documents in the case wouldn't have fooled a Windsor policemen, let alone Niger customs. The supreme Iraqi technicians who would have launched their missiles can't put the lights back on.

There is "questionable", as Andrew Gilligan would say, and there is "wrong". Score a big, fat one in the "wrong" column - and watch it come over the castle wall in a pink dress as the bells start ringing.