Tony Blair's Musical Chairs

WHEN A BELEAGUERED BRITISH PRIME MINISTER fired a bunch of his closest cabinet colleagues in the 1960s, the grubby desperation of the move was well captured by an opponent's quip: "Greater love hath no man than this," he said--"than to lay down his friends for his life."

As so many doomed prime ministers have done before him, Tony Blair has reached for the axe and chopped some of his longest-serving allies in a frenzied bid to extend the tenure of his failing premiership. The day after his ruling Labour party suffered its worst losses in local elections since coming to power in 1997, the British prime minister quickly dumped his home secretary and one of his few remaining close political allies, Charles Clarke. He stripped John Prescott, his deputy prime minister, of seemingly all but the ceremonial responsibilities of his post, and he demoted another ally, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, to the menial role of managing the government's legislative business as leader of the House of Commons.

Now, in fairness, there was a very good case for each of these humiliations. The week before the dismal local election results, Clarke was forced to admit he had been presiding over a shambles in the nation's prison system, in which more than 1,000 foreign prisoners had been released into the community instead of being deported.

That very same day, it was revealed that Prescott, 67, a brutish former seaman with a capacity to mangle the English language that makes George W. Bush sound like Wordsworth, had been exposed as having an affair with a jaunty 43-year-old lass who worked in his office. Their ardor, we know, thanks to plentiful photographic evidence supplied to the tabloids, had been consummated on all kinds of government property, while Prescott was supposed to be taking care of his considerable ministerial responsibilities.

Straw had spent the last few months telling anyone who would listen, in the highest pitched shriek possible, that there was no way anyone was going to attack Iran and anybody who said so (unnamed members of the Bush administration) was "nuts." This left Blair's foreign affairs adviser at Downing Street with the tiresome job of having to call around after every such outburst from the Foreign Office to explain to friends and allies that this was not the official government policy, which was to support tough measures against Iran and not rule out any course of action.

So the case for moving these three distinctly uncomical stooges from the prime time schedules was not, on its merits, a bad one. But that is not how it looked to a British public bored and frustrated with nine years of Blair government. It looked rather like the last desperate throw of a man well past his sell-by date. And the sad, unpalatable, barely utterable truth, acknowledged even by the prime minister's closest friends, is that it was.

Ever since Blair announced before last year's general election that he would not seek a fourth term if elected (the current one being his third), he has been like a man in a coma, lying there in nominal control of his mortality but with no real abilities, his friends and family squabbling over whether and when to pull the plug.

With every new blow to his credibility, the case for Blair staying on one more day gets weaker. Even his most ardent supporters now admit the end is near. Unofficially they are telling Blair's critics in the Labour party he will serve just one more year. They make the case, gamely, that much needs to be done in that time. Decisions will be made on extending Britain's nuclear power program, for example, and agreeing with Washington on a successor for Trident, the nation's nuclear deterrent. Both are determinations which it would be better for Blair to make in his twilight than for his designated successor, the increasingly impatient Gordon Brown, to have to deal with.

But no one is confident that he will remain on this political life support even for another year. Still, that is not the most important thing that changed in the last week. Blair's demise was already in the cards; now the country has seen the first intimation of the mortality of the whole government.