WHEN HAROLD Macmillan got rid of six of his Cabinet ministers in 1962, Harold Wilson produced one of his most memorable quips: “The Prime Minister has fired half his Cabinet,” he said. “The wrong half.”

Perhaps mindful of the futility of so many reshuffles on either side of the Atlantic, George Bush is leaving nothing to chance. Instead of a Night of the Long Knives, President Bush is currently in the middle of a Month of the Short Spoons — a long, drawn-out process in which he gently scoops out the detritus of his crushed and mangled Administration in an attempt to retrieve something of value in his remaining two and a half years.

A couple of weeks ago Andrew Card, the soft-spoken White House Chief of Staff, whose only memorable contribution to world history was as the man who broke the news to Mr Bush of the 9/11 attacks, slipped quietly into the night. On Monday the President moved Rob Portman, his chief trade policy man, to the White House Budget Director’s office vacated by Josh Bolten’s elevation to the Chief of Staff job. Next, on Wednesday morning, came the defenestration of the comically hapless Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary. In the past three years Mr McClellan has become about as plausible a spokesman for Mr Bush as the inimitable Comical Ali was for Saddam Hussein. The poor man is blamed for being the face of the Administration’s communications problem. You can see why.

At his daily press conference Mr McClellan conveyed a terror of speaking off the narrow line of his talking points that left the powerful impression of a man incapable of the most elementary of independent thought. His stilted, frightened response to reporters’ questions made you wonder what his home life must be like. You had visions of him being asked by his children whether they could go to the beach this year: “Well, I think, as we have always made clear, the beach is certainly a possibility but right now we’re keeping all available vacation options open.”

In fairness to Scotty the material he was given to work with wasn’t the finest. Elaborating plausibly on the President’s celebration of his handling of Hurricane Katrina would be a theatrical challenge of Olivier proportions. The task of spinning every setback in Iraq as a victory in the War on Terror would have made Tokyo Rose blush.

It was rather typical of the poor Mr McClellan’s career that even his departure was overshadowed by the next personnel change the White House announced just hours later: Karl Rove, the eminence grise and bête noire of the Bush team was being stripped of his policy responsibilities at the White House and was going back to being merely a political adviser.

This news generated much excitement in Washington. The clever Mr Rove is regarded by the press corps here with a mixture of awe, terror and burning resentment. The news that this Rasputin of the West Wing was to abandon the policy role he acquired only a year ago produced breathless headlines. “Rove Stripped of his Policy Role” conjured up a lovely image of a bowed and disgraced figure, weeping silently as the President ripped one of the stars off his epaulets.

But there is considerably less to this than meets the eye. In the White House, power grows not out of the barrel of a gun, or even from a fancy title on a business card, but from the number of times a day you speak to the President. And in that respect nothing is going to change. That Mr Rove will no longer be invited to meetings in the White House bunker to discuss fiscal policy is not going to alter his influence over the Administration one whit. Indeed the chances are that it will free him to dream up ever more cunning strategic schemes for the benefit of Republicans.

All of this sums up the reality of the Bush Administration’s current predicament. There is a fine effort under way to present these personnel changes — and the ones still to come — as a departure, a fresh if belated start, the start of the fight-back. But they are nothing of the sort. Not only because this President looks at his Administration and thinks: “Why mess with success?”, but also because the closer it gets to the end the harder it gets to achieve anything anyway.

The furore that erupted over Donald Rumsfeld’s future at the Pentagon is a fine example. The deeper, unreported truth about the Defence Secretary and the trahison des généraux is that he can’t go because there is no one to replace him. Who in their right mind would want to run a demoralised Pentagon, fighting two messy wars abroad and a seething one at home? John Snow, the Treasury Secretary, is still in office only because efforts to find someone of stature to replace him have come up empty.

All the buzz generated among Republicans in Washington is about which 2008 presidential campaign to sign on to. If you’re an ambitious foreign policy specialist you’re trying to impress Senators John McCain or George Allen, or Governor Mitt Romney. If the call comes from the White House you’d better put on a funny accent and pretend it’s the wrong number.

But the world will not wait while Washington finishes off a presidency. The Iraq war has to be fought to a successful political resolution; some serious economic reforms are going to be necessary to keep the US prosperous; and above all the Iran threat grows by the day.

President Bush is now the hostage of errors made in the past five years and the terminal constraint of the second-term presidency. One seasoned Washington observer, recently asked to name a single successful second presidential term, pondered long and hard and said: “Abraham Lincoln. But that was probably only because he was assassinated one month into it.”

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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