"This is not some manager at McDonald’s chewing out the staff," said one source. "This is the president of the United States and it is not a pretty sight."

Bush’s mood had already soured during Hurricane Katrina, when he was accused of being indifferent to the misery of New Orleans. It darkened further when Harriet Miers, his White House legal adviser and nominee for the Supreme Court, was scorned by his own conservative supporters as a hapless crony, forcing her to withdraw her candidature last week.

"Why wouldn’t he be irritable?" said Bill Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard. Everything for Bush had gone from bad to worse and, as fate would have it, the number of American deaths in Iraq passed 2,000 on Tuesday, promoting yet another media blitz on his performance in that country.

"He is like the lion in winter," said an ally. "He’s frustrated. He remains quite confident in the decisions he has made, but this is a guy who wanted to do big things in his second term. Given his nature, there is no way he would be happy about the way things have gone."

Things were about to get worse. Having promised to restore "dignity" to the White House after the bimbo eruptions of the Clinton era, on Friday Bush became the first American president in more than 30 years to see one of his most senior aides indicted on criminal charges.

Lewis "Scooter" Libby, right-hand man to Dick Cheney — the most powerful vice-president in American history — was charged on five counts of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice.

Patrick Fitzgerald, an apparently fearless and politically independent prosecutor who had earned his spurs taking down Chicago mobsters, had brought the indictment which concerned the unmasking of Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA operative.

Her outing by an as yet unnamed White House official came only months after her husband, a former US ambassador, had embarrassed Bush, Cheney and Libby by accusing them of misrepresenting the intelligence case of the war on Iraq.

After Fitzgerald had served his indictment on Friday, Libby immediately resigned and now has to report to the FBI for arrest and fingerprinting. If convicted, he faces up to 30 years in jail and a fine of up to $1.25m. So much, then, for dignity.

At first glance the Libby affair is a confusing — almost academic — tale of internecine Washington politics with little obvious explosive potential. Yet it is one that has struck at the core of one of Bush’s proudest and most controversial achievements: the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

Worse, perhaps, so far as middle America is concerned, it raises a question mark over the one thing that the Bush administration has always been strongest on — its apparently unwavering sense of patriotism.

THE story dates back to the early years of Bush’s presidency and the aftermath of the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Cheney and Libby were at the vanguard of the hardcore group of "neocon" advisers who believed that Saddam’s regime in Iraq should be toppled in the wake of the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

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