Just in case you had not noticed - what a wicked world we live in!

With all eyes focused on the battle to unseat Saddam Hussein, other regimes are taking advantage of the distracted concentration to pursue their evil ways, correctly assuming no one will take too much notice at the moment.

For instance, in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe has ruthlessly exploited the situation to launch an unprecedented assault against critics of his regime, arresting, detaining and torturing more than 500 opposition officials and supporters.

North Korea has flamboyantly pulled out of border talks with American officers and there are fears Kim Jong Il may be preparing another missile test.

On the India/Pakistan border, both sides have actually been conducting missile tests and shelling each other with heavy artillery.

Here at home, use of the war has been rather more subtle.

The Prince of Wales made sure the Peat report, on the grubby goings on in St James's Palace, due for publication before Christmas, was delayed until war was about to be declared.

While the story was well covered for a couple of days, it was quickly forgotten in the plethora of pre-war speculation.

In what I can only describe as the "Jo Moore legacy", the Government has been quietly burying damaging stories such as the U-turn on its determination to ban the breeding of chickens in those disgusting battery hen cages. It has capitulated to fierce lobbying from the egg industry.

But there is another story to which I would draw your attention. It disappeared quickly after minimal coverage. Its long-term social and financial implications for Britain are serious.

The annual decline in marriages has fallen below 250,000 for the first time since 1897, the year Queen Victoria celebrated her diamond jubilee. And at that time, the population of 31 million was little more than half today's.

It has long been a demonstration of liberal credentials, especially in the public services, to accept cohabitation as a stable relationship with status equivalent to marriage. It has become an orthodoxy few dare challenge today.

Realistically, cohabitation is, for the most part, a transient condition. A recent large-scale study showed the average length of cohabitation is two years. Less than ten per cent of such partnerships are cohabiting ten years later.

Even more worrying, within five years of the birth of a child, 52 per cent of cohabiting couples have split up, compared with 8 per cent of married couples.

British rates of teenage pregnancy, lone parent households and the associated family poverty are all higher than our European counterparts.

And although cohabitation is not a phenomenon confined to Britain, raising children outside the protection of two committed parents is uniquely popular.

Even though successive British governments have wilted under pressure from the new liberal orthodoxy, we cannot continue ignoring this home made social and economic time bomb as though it does not exist.

The war against Saddam will end. This problem will still be here.