Peter Oborne

There has been no more abject moment in the Blair premiership than last Tuesday afternoon's capitulation to the trade unions. The grandees of the movement, led by the new TUC general secretary Brendan Barber, were ushered with some deference into Downing Street. The ambitious Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt, who has spent the past two years sucking up to the unions – or, as her allies prefer to put it, 'undoing the damage' caused by her predecessor Stephen Byers – viewed proceedings with pleasure. Finally, there was John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, looking smug. Under discussion was a new settlement between the unions and government. For the past six years Tony Blair has viewed the brothers with a certain hauteur.

The lightening of Tony Blair's mood on Sunday afternoon was palpable. For two days, ever since news of David Kelly's suicide broke during his Far-East tour, the Prime Minister had looked haggard and broken. His voice went miserable and panicky. But the BBC announcement that Dr Kelly was the source for reporter Andrew Gilligan brought the colour back to the Prime Minister's cheeks. Tony Blair and his Downing Street strategists believed that the revelation that Kelly was the source gave them the chance to seize victory in their six-week-old war against the BBC. They were certain they could identify fault-lines in the BBC testimony and secure an apology as well as the dismissal of Gilligan. The Prime Minister's optimism was premature. This weekend the government is back on the rack.

Most prime ministers arrive at 10 Downing Street battle-hardened. Not so Tony Blair. He had an easy ride to the top: the fortuitous arrival as a young MP; his swift emergence as a shadow Cabinet star; the man in the right place when John Smith died. For his first five years in government, this effortless success was sustained. He was blessed with a uniquely benign combination of circumstances: a strong economy, a large majority and a weak opposition. He has never, till now, experienced political adversity. The last few weeks have been the worst by far since he entered politics 20 years ago. This is new, unpredictable terri-tory. The Blair government – witness the humiliation of the hunting vote or the reshuffle shambles – has lost direction.

I was unable to cope when I joined the parliamentary lobby as a reporter for the London Evening Standard more than ten years ago. I faced two problems, both of them disastrous. The first was that I did not know how to recognise a political story. A grand set-piece – the sacking of a minister, or the fall of a government – was obvious enough to anyone. But the kind of event that fills the newspapers on a daily basis appeared to me arbitrary, governed by laws that I could not fathom. The second problem was even worse. Once a story had been drawn to my attention, I did not know how to write it. It was a bad time.

The late Tony Bevins, whose final public act was to resign on grounds of principle as political editor of the Daily Express the moment Richard Desmond bought the paper, was a close student of New Labour. Not long before he died he set out, in a series of articles which still repay close study, its chief characteristics. New Labour advanced, so Bevins held, by a series of curious, indirect, sideways jerks. Bevins nevertheless insisted that New Labour had clear objectives. The irregular method of progression, he maintained, was merely designed to confuse the enemy. Bevins approved of, or at any rate excused, this stratagem because he shared Tony Blair's own belief that openness and candour would prove wholly fatal to the New Labour project.

A photograph was taken of the Blair Cabinet immediately after the 1997 general election. There is a bemused, nervous air about the Prime Minister and his colleagues, as if they had just won the National Lottery but weren't quite sure whether the cheque had cleared. But there is also a palpable sense of common purpose. That unity was finally destroyed last week, as Clare Short quit the Cabinet. She is the 13th of the original 22 to leave since 2 May 1997. One of the 13, Ron Davies, quit through scandal; but most have been driven out of office by Tony Blair. The list of victims is now very long and quite distinguished.

The central proposition behind the government's public-relations campaign since the end of the Iraq war is that Tony Blair has undergone some mid-life personality enhancement. We are now entreated to believe that the amiable, grinning weathercock to which we had grown accustomed has been replaced by a steely world leader. These claims do not square with the evidence of the last few weeks, during which the Prime Minister has attempted to steer the government back on to a domestic agenda. Two weeks ago, at his latest Downing Street conference, the Prime Minister described public-service reform in the kind of portentous terms he hitherto reserved for the Iraq or Kosovo wars.

The elaborate construction of the story of Tony Blair as lonely war leader, noted here last week, has continued to preoccupy Downing Street strategists as well as the political class more broadly. This ambitious enterprise, launched at an important moment for the government, urgently demands to become the subject of a serious academic treatise. One can only stand back and marvel at the energy, ingenuity and sheer volume of tender loving care that has helped engender the fantastic rodomontade of truth, falsehood, reality and fantasy that now encompasses the British Prime Minister, threatening to turn him into a barely intelligible and, in most respects, fictitious creature.

British politics has been frozen in a kind of reiterative cycle ever since Black Wednesday 1992: the Conservatives becalmed at 30 per cent in the polls, the Liberal Democrats making stealthy gains, New Labour dominant. Just six weeks ago there seemed some reason to believe that the Iraq war would bring some fluidity to this tedious state of affairs. Not so. The recent conflict has left everything the same; only more so. This means that Tony Blair has never been as strong or enjoyed so much freedom of action as is the case this weekend. The defeat of Saddam has granted him what comes the way of very few prime ministers: the chance to reinvent his premiership. Whether he is capable of making use of this opportunity remains to be seen; so far the initial signs are discouraging.

It was an unusual preliminary to the war. No British prime minister before Tony Blair has set the scene for a military campaign with a visit to the Vatican for a blessing by the Pope. Admittedly it was not a state visit. Tony Blair's trip to the Vatican was apparently in the capacity of the spouse of a practising Catholic. Nevertheless, it was very striking indeed that the Prime Minister, visibly exhausted by a demanding schedule, should find the time on the eve of war. It is now conventionally held that Tony Blair is the most religious prime minister since Gladstone. 'There is no doubt,' writes the Sunday Telegraph columnist Matthew d'Ancona, 'that he seeks authorisation for war, as well as personal spiritual solace, in the Gospels.

For some reason Britain is always sunny on the outbreak of war. London basked under a heat-wave in August 1914 as Asquith almost casually condemned Britain to four years of slaughter. It was the same in September 1939. This week has seen a succession of cloudless spring days. I suppose there is always the remote hope that something will intervene, but it looks all but certain that bombs will be falling on Baghdad by the time these words are read. It is a new kind of war, corresponding to the latest manifestation of American imperialism. Old-style US conservatives, like Henry Kissinger, were pessimists. They worked with the world as they found it, merely seeking to mould intractable materials as best they could to US interests.

All prime ministers need to be sustained by one necessary but reassuring myth: the illusion that they are in control. Some, exceptionally lucky, prime ministers are able to leave office with that illusion intact. But Tony Blair is close to the horrifying moment, which can be the psychological equivalent of a car crash, when that comfortable falsehood is stripped away. It is the moment when a political leader ceases to be the plausible architect and becomes instead the public victim of events. Till now Tony Blair has been portrayed by his numerous admirers as a strong, confident leader. This week two developments changed that picture, maybe for good.