It was an oddly lonely rendezvous. Before a diminished press corps at his remote Texas ranch, a lame-duck president and his Danish ally shook hands, smiled for the cameras and chatted about their weekend ahead, of mountain-biking and fishing.

An invitation to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, is an honour that President Bush saves only for the closest of friends. In seven years of his presidency, only six world leaders boast the privilege of being his guest there and at the official retreat at Camp David.

One, Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, is now a sworn enemy and paid-up member of the so-called “axis of weasel”, who with his French and German counterparts, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, fell out of favour with Mr Bush when they refused to support the invasion of Iraq.

Of the other five, all the most prominent leaders of the “coalition of the willing”, only Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish Prime Minister, is still standing. The others — Mr Blair, José María Aznar, of Spain, Silvio Berlusconi of Italy and Junichiro Koizumi, of Japan — are all gone, variously hounded out of office by angry voters, resigning with a tainted legacy, plotting political comebacks or keeping out of the limelight, burnt out by the intensity of the Iraq misadventure.

Mr Aznar’s was the first scalp, and the one first to spook even Washington’s staunchest allies. As Spanish Prime Minister, Mr Aznar was cruising towards easy victory in the 2004 elections when bombs ripped through Madrid’s railways, killing nearly 200 people. He disastrously pinned blame on Basque separatists, even as it became apparent that Islamist terrorists were behind the plot. It was not simply the deception that sank him but also the perception that Spain’s involvement in the war, despite strong public opposition, was the very reason that it became a target. The first move of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the electoral victor, was to announce the withdrawal of all Spanish troops from Iraq — to Washington’s predictable fury.

Portugal followed, pulling troops out in early 2005, soon after José Manuel Barroso, the host of the war-planning Azores summit, resigned to become President of the European Commission. The prestigious appointment brought limited comfort to Mr Barroso, who complained that he had been duped into supporting the war by Washington and egged on by a hawkish Mr Aznar. In February last year, Mr Aznar, who now teaches a graduate course in political leadership, publicly admitted for the first time that the war had been based on mistaken intelligence.

Silvio Berlusconi, the flamboyant former Italian Prime Minister, is not the type to apologise but growing public opposition to the war, fuelled by the shooting by American soldiers of an Italian agent bringing a kidnapped journalist to safety, forced him into a pledge to withdraw his 3,000 troops. Only 300 had been brought home, however, by the time that the electorate, angered by Iraq and the constant corruption scandals, called time on Mr Berlusconi. His successor, Romano Prodi, used his first policy speech to declare the war “a grave error” and drive ahead with bringing home every last Italian soldier.

Mr Koizumi, the most popular postwar Japanese politician, swanned through the Iraq war almost untainted until a hostage crisis threatened to turn public support overwhelmingly against him. Although Japanese opposition to the war was high, the deployment of the Japanese Self-Defence Force to a war zone for the first time since its creation after the Second World War brought pride to a nation that had long accepted the humiliating of contracting out its defence to others. Mr Koizumi bowed out unscathed, leaving Shinzo Abe, his successor, to reap the punishment for his closeness to an increasingly unpopular Washington.

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