IN MAY 2000 an American of short stature, intense eyes and impeccably blow-dried hair played a round of golf at St Andrews before he moved on to London to take tea with Baroness Thatcher.

Few people who saw him on the fabled links, or at the Four Seasons Hotel, would have recognised Tom DeLay, either by appearance or by his string of colourful nicknames. Or as the king of Capitol Hill.

Mr DeLay, cheerleader of the Christian Right and ruthless legislator on its behalf, wields more power over the US domestic landscape than President Bush. But the Republican leader in the House of Representatives is spending much of his time battling sleaze claims while fending off criminal investigators. The latest revelation this week was that he paid his wife and daughter $500,000 (£270,000) from campaign funds.

The dubious funding of three overseas trips — to Britain, South Korea and Russia — appears to fall foul of House ethics rules. The British visit was largely paid for by $50,000 of tainted Indian gambling money. Republican congressmen are twitchy. The Wall Street Journal, the house journal of the Right, says there is “an odour” about Mr DeLay.

As a younger man who loved a party, whose dancing was widely admired and who had yet to find God, Mr DeLay was known as Hot Tub Tom.

Hot Tub Tom is in now serious hot water. If he were to fall, and such a possibility is now the talk of Washington, he would take with him Republican confidence of a generation of hegemony.

Mr DeLay has come a long way. From a hardscrabble upbringing in the arid foothills of the Texas chaparral and starting without the help of wealthy patrons, powerful friends or any particular star quality, he has made it to the top of the Republican party.

A one-time cockroach exterminator, Mr DeLay has built the mightiest of political machines. Fuelled by unprecedented fund-raising and unshakeable resolve, he has used it to drive the agenda of religious conservatives and in doing so has transformed US politics.

More than anyone, Mr DeLay embodies the marriage of big money and the religious Right which swept to power in Congress in the Gingrich revolution of 1994. It makes his troubles all the more captivating.

He has been criticised three times by the House Ethics Committee for sins that included trying to win a congressman’s support for a key vote by offering tens of thousands of dollars to support his son’s political future. Since then Mr DeLay has purged the committee, packing it with loyalists who have helped bankroll him. Accompanying rule changes make it virtually impossible for charges against a Republican to progress.

There are other troubles. Two DeLay associates face charges involving $80 million raked in from the casino-rich and gullible Choctaw Indians in return for promised influence in Washington. Three others have been indicted for money laundering and illegal fund-raising for one of Mr DeLay’s campaign committees. The prosecuting attorney in Texas has not ruled out charges against Mr Delay.

Mr DeLay’s many foes would think it fitting if his story ended in Texas, where it began 58 years ago near Laredo, an unprepossessing town on the Mexican border.

His alcoholic father, an itinerant oilman, headed a dysfunctional family from which Mr DeLay has been estranged for a decade.

Times Recommends

• 'New York has lost its edge'
• Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too
• More than 17,000 new underwater species found