The new US ambassador to the UN, who once claimed Cuba was developing germ warfare, believes that there should be only one member of the Security Council (guess who)

A senior member of the British intelligence services once told me that when he has a job vacancy, he always gets someone to ride up in the lift with each applicant and report back. People always reveal most about themselves when they think they are not being observed, he said, and you glean little apercus that you would never gather from a formal interview. I've always felt much the same way about how people decorate their offices: it gives a psychological insight not only into how they perceive the world, but also into the way they believe they fit into that world.

So what do we make of this? I'm told that John R Bolton, whose nomination as US ambassador to the United Nations was announced by Condoleezza Rice last Monday, keeps a bronze hand grenade on prominent display in his office alongside pictures of right-wing heroes. The last time I was in the office of Robert Zoellick, confirmed last month as Rice's deputy at the State Department, he had on his wall some paintings from Cassius Coolidge's early 20th-century portfolio of dogs playing poker, smoking cigars, and so forth. I once asked Zoellick why he chose this art for his walls, and he said it was merely because he liked the pictures - and also because he enjoyed watching people's reaction to them.

I mention all this because the two men represent a struggle between two factions within the Bush administration, one that was put to rest only temporarily by Rice's announcement of Bolton's new post. The likes of Dick Cheney strove to have Bolton - angry, self-obsessed, his mind made up about the world - appointed as Rice's deputy. More temperate figures such as Stephen Hadley, Bush's new national security adviser, favoured Zoellick - whimsical, self-deprecating, a man still curious about the world. Zoellick may have landed the number-two position at State last month - one that Bolton himself coveted - but Cheney saw to it that Bolton, 56, then leapfrogged from the number-four position the following month.

With one blow, Bolton, a zealous defender of the faith, has thus become more important than Zoellick. He will now have a highly visible pulpit to give vent to all the demons that exercise him and the Bushites, including the UN itself: the UN Security Council, he said in 2000, should have one member only, and it should be the United States, "because that's the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world". He once said that "if the UN Secretariat building lost ten storeys it wouldn't make a bit of difference".

A charming fellow, in other words. Like George W Bush himself, and Cheney, Bolton is fuelled by animus, by a perpetual struggle to give the bad guys their come-uppance, by a need to pump out slogans that serve as substitutes for thought-out policies. He was not content, for example, just to support sanctions against Iran and Libya; he had to get in a nasty swipe at those who disagreed, writing in the New York Times that "some Europeans have never lost faith in appeasement as a way of life". Bolton says "the happiest moment of my government service" was when the Bush administration renounced the International Criminal Court treaty; he was at least partly instrumental in forcing the US towards abandonment of the anti-ballistic-missile and Kyoto treaties, too.

In many ways, Bolton reflects the true motivations of the Bush administration and most of its members. The real aphrodisiac for him, as with so many of the rest, is power for its own sake; morality does not come into the picture, though they protest mightily (and even sometimes believe) that it does. Bolton has even made extravagant claims about intelligence showing that Fidel Castro is developing a germ-warfare programme, assertions so ludicrous that he was forced to back down. He likes adopting eff-you attitudes, too, apparently needing to show just how much of a tough guy he is. He says the US has no obligation to keep paying UN dues, for example. Yet, in all this blustering, he somehow also conveys more than a whiff of Bush-like insecurity.

With his long, lank hair, clearly brushed to minimise incipient baldness, and his attention-seeking moustache, Bolton looks like a figure of fun. Yet he is a consummate Washington insider, having worked for the Department of Justice in the Reagan administration and the State Department in both Bush administrations. In the past four years, he managed to get the better of Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage. Like John Ashcroft and Bush himself, he went to Yale (though I'm not sure what this says about Yale).

So there we have it: Bolton the angry romantic versus Zoellick the amiable realist. Though Zoellick may technically outrank his rival, Bolton has won a job that is potentially more powerful. But principles can change in a flash in Bushworld. The former senator John Danforth, Bolton's likeable predecessor, lasted less than six months.

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