WHEN TONY BLAIR decided in May to move Jack Straw from the Foreign Office, he reasoned that not much was likely to happen in foreign affairs over the next year. The Prime Minister can hardly have expected to be proved so wrong so quickly — or to have found himself suddenly so terribly isolated in his uncritical support for the Israeli assault on Lebanon.

Even around his own Cabinet table, there are many, many more dissenters than loyalists on this issue. Last Thursday, even stalwart Blairites such as David Miliband and Lord Grocott (Chief Whip in the Lords) spoke up against him.

A swift canvass of Cabinet views yesterday confirmed this. “There’s a lot of unease,” said one minister. “The consequences of this are extremely serious. It definitely doesn’t help Tony’s position.” Another said it was “absolutely dreadful — and the sight of us being rather powerless in it all is depressing too”. A third was more astringent still. “It’s doing incredible damage. This could be the end of him. If Tony can’t get this right, it will hasten his end.”

None of these Cabinet ministers would be disloyal to the Prime Minister in any other context. And that is what should be alarming Mr Blair so much. His position on the Middle East is losing him old friends — and that is an outcome that a weakened leader, already on his way out, can ill afford.

Of course there are reflex anti-Americans in the Labour Party, and reflex anti-Israelis too. But the unremitting attack on Lebanon — including the bombing of fleeing civilians, ambulances and a UN shelter — has turned otherwise pro-American, pro-Israeli people into sceptics. From Sir Gerald Kaufman, at Foreign Office questions this week, to Stephen Glover, writing in the Daily Mail yesterday, friends of Israel are turning critical. And so, ask Labour politicians, why can’t Mr Blair?

MPs are very unhappy about going away for the summer without some resolution to this problem. They desperately hope that Mr Blair will at least show, at his joint press conference with George Bush tonight, some independence of view. They simply don’t understand why the undoubtedly beneficial special relationship demands unquestioning acquiescence by Britain in all US — and by extension, Israeli — foreign policy.

After all, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had the deepest and most successful alliance between a British Prime Minister and a US President since the wartime partnership of Churchill and Roosevelt. Yet she had no qualms about disagreeing with him from time to time, often violently.

Writing about their relationship in 1988, I spoke to many close observers of it. “She correctly sees her task as keeping an eye on the President,” said General Alexander Haig, former Secretary of State. So she swept off to Camp David after Mr Reagan announced his Strategic Defence Initiative to secure an agreement from him that SDI would not isolate America from Europe. She did the same after the Reykjavik summit, when she was worried that he was about to negotiate away nuclear weapons. She was also livid when the US invaded Grenada.

But this never threatened the alliance between the two countries or the two heads of government. Indeed, as Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s Defence Secretary, told me at the time, the President had enormous respect for her. “He admires her personality, her persistence and her eloquence.”

Of those three, I should imagine that Mr Bush admires only Mr Blair’s eloquence, though even that gift seems to slip when the two men talk privately, judging by the excruciating “Yo, Blair!” conversation. And does the Prime Minister really tell Mr Bush in private the home truths that he is not prepared to say in public?

I doubt it. One of Mr Blair’s abiding flaws is his abhorrence of personal conflict. He hates delivering difficult messages to people — which helps to explain both his continually botched reshuffles and his inability to deal with Gordon Brown over the years.

Yet the Prime Minister, who is always ready to understand his international colleagues’ problems with their electorates, could surely explain to Mr Bush how different attitudes are here in Britain. A recent New York Times poll found only 7 per cent of Americans saying that the US should criticise Israel’s recent actions. Yet, in an ICM poll for The Guardian this week, 61 per cent said that Israel had overreacted to the threat it faced and 63 per cent thought that Mr Blair had tied this country too closely to the US.

The last time the Prime Minister took a big risk in foreign affairs — by going to war with Iraq — a much higher proportion of voters was on his side. He had made a coherent case, and people were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and the subsequent turmoil in Iraq have eroded voters’ trust in his judgment. Now only 36 per cent believe the war was justified, although a peak of 63 per cent supported it at the time.

So far no British soldiers are embroiled in Lebanon. But the Prime Minister’s position still looks precarious. “It’s hard to exaggerate how damaging the ‘Yo, Blair’ thing has been to Tony’s credibility,” says one Cabinet minister. There won’t be a Geoffrey Howe moment, he says, because Parliament has now shut down for the summer. “But if enough of the drums started beating . . .” Then what? “It doesn’t feel good, I can tell you.”

MPs will be stewing over the summer, talking to constituents, who feel, like they do, desperately ashamed of their Government. Unless Mr Blair comes up with a successful deal that produces a ceasefire, his private diplomacy will be discredited. And that may well hasten his end.

maryann.sieghart@thetimes.co.uk

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