Just imagine what we would all have said if Charles Clarke had resigned on the spot last week. “What a great man!” “How refreshing to see a politician take responsibility!” “At last a minister has done something honourable.”

Clarke the hero would have burnished both his reputation and that of the Government. He would have gone down as another Sir Thomas Dugdale or Lord Carrington. What’s more, he could easily have returned to the Cabinet after a short period of grace.

Why didn’t he? The trouble these days is that people spend all their lives struggling to reach the top, but few trouble to think about exit strategies once they get there. Yet, now that senior jobs are routinely given to people in their early forties, exit strategies have become more important.

In our parents’ generation, your best job was your last. You could expect to be promoted to it in your fifties and to hold it until you retired. This was as true for the prime minister (or indeed home secretary) as it was for any other walk of life. Hence your only concern was to do the job as well as you could before retiring gracefully.

How different it all seems now. We have a Prime Minister who became Labour leader at 41 and moved in to No 10 just before his 44th birthday. Even if he lasts for ten years, he’ll be giving up next summer at 54. That’s too young to retire altogether. You can hardly imagine him doing nothing more than playing air guitar to Radio 2 in the kitchen.

Back in October 1994, I asked Blair about this in an interview for The Times. He admitted that his unexpected elevation after John Smith’s death had been “a huge upheaval” in his life. “It means that you reshape your life. You realise that instead of the ten years after the next ten years being the time when you were going to . . . [he peters out] it’s got to happen now. You have to come to terms with the fact that you will probably do something else before you retire.” And what would that be? “I don’t know. I really don’t know,” he murmured.

Clarke could have had a second chance in government. Former prime ministers usually don’t. So it is important for Blair to plan his exit strategy: how best to leave office and how best to rebuild his life once he is out.

He has always known that he wanted to go at a time of his choosing rather than being chucked out by either the voters or his own party. Announcing before the last election that he would not fight another made it less likely that his own side would eject him. And it allowed the electorate to vote for him safe in the knowledge that he would not go on and on.

But the difficulty now lies in engineering a dignified exit rather than a rout. If Labour is pummelled in today’s local elections, if someone is prosecuted in the loans-for-peerages scandal, if Blair loses control of his parliamentary party, then he is in danger of fulfilling Enoch Powell’s prognosis that all political careers end in failure.

Instead, he must be hoping that sometime over the next few months there will be a break in the clouds, a success which reflects well on him (perhaps a total withdrawal of troops from Northern Ireland?) and an opportunity to declare either that he is going at once or that he is arranging an orderly transition so that his successor can take over, say, on his tenth anniversary next May.

That would inhibit any attempts to oust him before then. What would be the point? It would ensure a relatively orderly party conference. The only worry is that it could leech much of his remaining power — and represent a victory for Gordon Brown.

The latter is a trivial quibble, which should not detain him for a moment. As for power, no one much expects him to go on beyond next summer, anyway. If anything, the risk is more on the other side — that people think he could be pushed out sooner.

And once he has gone, what then? He may leave the Commons altogether, but he won’t join the Lords. He clearly needs to spend a year or two on the American lecture circuit to pay off his mortgage. His memoirs ought to bring in a bob or three.

My guess is that he will then devote himself to a cause which is unambiguously good, as Bill Clinton has done with Aids. After all the sordid trade-offs and constraints of government, it would seem such a relief. And as for status? Who needs it, when you’ve already been Prime Minister?

maryann.sieghart@thetimes.co.uk

This may be a load of crystal balls . . .

Reshuffles are famously hard to predict. But here’s a punt, for what it’s worth. John Prescott won’t be sacked altogether, but he will be relieved of his department and put in the Cabinet Office to do the only thing he is reasonably good at: chairing Cabinet committees and resolving disputes between ministers. For the sake of his vanity, he can retain the title of Deputy Prime Minister alongside the meaningless one of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

I may be wrong, of course. But if not, you read it here first.

Progress of a sort

A leaflet drops through my letterbox listing all 46 Conservative candidates for the Hammersmith and Fulham council elections. Some 17 of them are women: a real advance. Many are young, energetic-looking and attractive.

But there is only one Asian and no blacks, in a borough which contains 20 per cent ethnic-minority residents. And there is a suspiciously high proportion of posh double-barrelled surnames. Still, we mustn’t quibble. Progress is progress.

Candid oyster

I finally gave in and bought an Oystercard for Tube travel this week, now that single tickets have become so preposterously expensive. The man at the ticket office told me that he had to deduct a £3 deposit.

“Deposit for what?” I asked. “Oh, it’s just a rip-off fee, basically,” he replied. If only Ken Livingstone would display such candour.

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