We go to inordinate lengths to avoid civilian casualties,' said the junior defence minister, John Spellar, yesterday. It's an odd word to use, 'inordinate', since its meanings, according to Collins, include 'unrestrained, intemperate, irregular, disordered.' Which seems to sum up Nato's strategy pretty well. It also summed up the opposition, which is just about as irregular, disordered and intemperate these days as you can get.  But the Commons as a whole is getting edgy about this war and the Tories in particular look ragged. 'Lack of moral fibre', they would call it in the army. Yesterday they were more jittery than ever before, and this was before anyone knew about Milosevic's offer. John Maples, the Tories' defence spokesman, said there had been 'a quite unacceptable degree of incompetence' in the Chinese embassy bombing: 'The address of the embassy is in the phone book,' he added, bitterly.  George Robertson admitted that it had been 'a huge and terrible error', but even so he quickly wrote it off, to his own satisfaction at least. 'Expressions of regret have been made,' he said airily. You got the general impression that he couldn't quite see what all the fuss was about. Given that Nato had bombed a nuclear power with a seat on the security council, he seemed somewhat offhand.  Diane Abbott asked if there weren't maps of Belgrade which showed foreign embassies, and got brusquely ticked off for her pains. 'Can I say that facetious remarks about targeting are not appropriate in these tragic circumstances?' said the defence secretary. What a marvellous politician's reply that was! Your side makes a dreadful and avoidable mistake (how many billions of dollars is the CIA given each year not to read the Belgrade A-Z?) and when someone points this out, you accuse them of levity in the face of death.  Martin Bell, who probably knows more about the Balkans than any 10 MPs put together, said scornfully that 'the greatest military alliance in the world is becoming 'the gang that cannot shoot straight'.'  George Robertson just about held the line. But then Robin Cook made a statement. You could tell how rattled he was (the death of his highly regarded junior minister, Derek Fatchett, can't have helped at all) when Alan Clark made some remark about a Belgrade street map, and he snapped 'that was a very tasteless remark'.  Given that Mr Clark is the Commons' unquestioned king of tastelessness, I thought that, for him, it was positively genteel.  Then Michael Howard got up and started talking about 'grave disquiet' on the Tory benches. There was a feeling, he said, that 'the action is being made up as we go along, and has not properly been thought through'. The gist of it was that the whole thing had gone horribly wrong and it was probably the government's fault.  Mr Cook was furious. Why did the opposition keep shifting the basis of its support for the war? He contrived to accuse Mr Howard of being soft on Milosevic. 'We are fighting a great evil. It would be helpful if you endorsed any of my statements about the nature of that evil,' he said to Tory shouts of 'withdraw! withdraw!'  Which he did later, in distinctly grudging fashion, adding: 'I do find that for every criticism of Belgrade there were five criticisms of the allies.' But it was already clear what was happening. The Tories, like so many rats in Savile Row suits, were sashaying down the gangway of the sinking ship, their gait speeding up with each alarming lurch of the liner.