FOR five years Tony Blair has worn his power with something close to nonchalance. He knew that leadership fitted him well — it might have been tailor-made — and he knew he looked dandy it it. High office was carried easily, lightly, as if to the manner born, without breaking a sweat.

Suddenly, in the space of a few weeks, Mr Blair has changed utterly. I have never seen a man more burdened by power, more acutely conscious of the weight of responsibility, as he prepares to go to war, whatever may happen in the UN, the Labour Party, or the country. His face is grey and thin. His hair has died from exhaustion. A bump has appeared on his forehead.

Mr Blair knows that his political future will be defined by the next 72 hours. His expression was that of a saint-martyr on a stained glass window: ascetic, drained and brittle. He is no longer living on plaudit and soundbite, but on raw adrenalin, self-belief and the knowledge that disaster and humiliation are as likely as the success that has always come so effortlessly. He is living in a place of trial and tension that he has never been to before.

He found brief respite — and pure irony — yesterday as he joined the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to open a sumptuous exhibition of paintings from Dresden at the Royal Academy: two leaders with diametrically opposed views on the coming war, yet avowing friendship as they viewed pictures that survived the British bombing of Dresden in the Second World War. “This was easily the best part of my day,” Mr Blair said with feeling. “The best part of any of my days, actually.”

There had been no such camaraderie at Prime Minister’s Questions earlier. There was no appreciative murmur as he entered the chamber, alone, and slipped to his seat by the dispatch box, the place where the buck stops.

“It’s important that I set out as Prime Minister what I believe to be right in this country’s national interests,” he said, enunciating every word. “I’ve tried to do so these past few months because there is a real threat to this country from international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.” Gesticulating furiously, Blair struck his knuckle on the Despatch Box, hard. It must have hurt like hell. He gave no sign he even noticed.

Usually surrounded by papers and private secretaries and purpose, yesterday he cut an extraordinarily lonely figure. Not isolated, far from unsupported, but somehow alone in the dangerous situation that he has created.

As he spoke of life and death, the “tragedy” that would befall the UN if it failed to act, Blair’s manner evoked the words of Dag Hammar- skjöld, one of the earliest architects and martyrs of the UN: “Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.”

The mood in the chamber was equally strained and friable. The Labour MP Derek Foster tried to cheerlead some support, applauding the Prime Minister’s “heroic” efforts, but won only half a cheer. “Hear . . .” said a few loyalists, and stopped.

The threat of Donald Rumsfeld, weapon of diplomatic mass destruction, hovered over the Labour backbench. Blair managed a glassy smile, and something that might have been humour, had he not been so utterly serious. “I can’t actually answer for the comments of every member of every administration around the world,” he said, adding after a pause: “Including occasionally even my own.”

Clare Short was short-circuited, but not before Iain Duncan Smith had ruined a good performance by opportunistically raising collective Cabinet responsibility, again and again. “Ha ha ha,” said the Tory backbenchers, too loudly for the moment.

Woodrow Wilson once observed that when a man takes office, “he either grows or he swells”. For five years Blair has seemed to swell, becoming ever more comfortable in the mantle of power. Whether or not he is now going in the right direction, Blair was leading yesterday as he has never led before. As he faced a deeply uncertain future, he seemed to have grown.

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