Tony Blair must be reflecting ruefully on Enoch Powell's dictum that all political careers end in failure. He has been trying to engineer an end to his own that defied the rule: to go at a moment of his own choosing, basking in the applause of a grateful public, having fought his enemies to a standstill. But there is no warm autumnal glow in prospect: the political weather for the rest of his Prime Ministership looks set to be unending winter punctuated only by storms and tempests. Public and party seem to think that his time is up, whether he likes it or not. If such a verdict cannot be changed, it has to be heeded.

More than ever in the age of television, there is a charged emotional element in the personal relationship between leaders and led, whose likes and dislikes are not strictly rational. At the heart of what has gone wrong between Mr Blair and the electorate is a breakdown of trust. In this case, the events of 11 September five years ago were a watershed. After the worst and most spectacular terrorist atrocity the world had ever seen, Mr Blair decided to stand side by side with President Bush.

It was a noble and decent gesture. But he quickly found himself in what was clearly a subservient role, a bit player in a drama scripted by the Washington neo-conservatives. Mr Blair never acknowledged the groundswell of anti-Americanism this triggered inside the Labour Party, which felt profoundly humiliated that Labour's leader was billed as the best friend of the most jingoistic and right-wing, yet least competent and uncharismatic, American presidents in recent history. Iraq symbolised this. The impression that Mr Blair doctored the intelligence evidence so that he could offer Mr Bush Britain's wholehearted support did fatal damage to his bond with the public, which time has not healed.

He fought and won the 2005 election on the basis that it would be his last. Since then speculation about exactly when he would retire has grown into a frenzy, with different ...

Even the United States realises it needs the United Nations. The idea popular among neo-conservatives in Washington that the UN was useful only in so far as it did America's will has given way to a wiser understanding, whispered in President Bush's ear by both his new Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and his best friend Tony Blair, that not all problems in the world can be settled by American might and the ...

Pope Benedict was leaving himself open to challenge when he remarked in an interview that women "are very present in the departments of the Holy See". It was a tacit invitation to delve into the Annuario Pontificio, the Vatican's Year Book, and count them. The result, according to our Rome correspondent Robert Mickens, is that no more than 15 per cent of the named total of officials of the Holy See are ...

To adapt Winston Churchill's famous phrase, jaw-jaw has replaced war-war in the Middle East, at least for the time being, and that has to be a change for the better. Israel now has to digest the rough handling its army received from Hezbollah, decide whether the campaign was a catastrophe or not, and if so, whom to sack. The Government of Lebanon has to begin the huge task of reconstruction following Israel's ...

A few days before the International Aids Conference in Toronto, a report on HIV-Aids in Africa by the mainly evangelical agency Tearfund has concluded that church congregations all over Africa are in the front line in dealing with the depredations of Aids. Working with extended families, they are particularly notable in the care they give to the millions of orphans the epidemic has produced. The report calls for a ...