“AMERICANS can always be relied upon to do the right thing,” Winston Churchill once said. “But only after they have exhausted every other alternative.”

For most Republicans, President Bush’s nomination yesterday of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court was welcome proof that the old Tory, half-American himself, was, as ever, absolutely right.

Mr Bush’s announcement yesterday seemed to mark for conservatives a return to political common sense at the White House after a brief but damaging detour through the wonderland of the Harriet Miers nomination. Ms Miers, who had no obvious qualifications for a place on the nation’s highest court other than that she had been Mr Bush’s own lawyer, was finally forced to withdraw her nomination last week after fellow Republicans denounced her.

Judge Alito is, by contrast, precisely the kind of jurist conservatives have been hoping to get on the court for years. Intellectually brilliant, with lengthy experience near the summit of the American judicial system — 15 years on the US Court of Appeals — he is a judge with an impeccable conservative record of using his position to interpret the Constitution narrowly, not to make laws.

Republicans were also happy that Mr Bush had begun the long climb back from the valley of political death in which he has been wandering for the past two months.

Setbacks in Iraq, the faltering response to Hurricane Katrina, the Miers nomination and, of course, last week’s indictment and resignation of Scooter Libby, chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney, had created a mood of profound apprehension among his supporters that, with more than three years to go, Mr Bush’s presidency was rapidly imploding.

They were relieved last week when Patrick Fitzgerald’s prosecutorial scalpel dug only as far as Mr Libby, and did not reach Karl Rove, Mr Bush’s top adviser. Now, Judge Alito’s nomination gives them new hope that Mr Bush will reunite a fractured conservative movement and begin to rebuild his battered presidency. But if conservatives were enthusiastically getting back into fighting mode, Democrats looked just as eager to suit up and meet them on the battlefield.

The Senate must confirm the nomination, and though Republicans have a majority there, Democrats and some centrist Republicans may have enough votes to block confirmation.

The Left was quick to demonise Judge Alito as an extreme conservative who would outlaw abortion, strike down affirmative action and generally return American life to the political Stone Age. Democrats focused yesterday on a case in which the judge dissented from the majority of his appeals court when it struck down a Pennsylvania law in 1991 that required a woman seeking an abortion to notify her husband. He insisted in his dissent that he was not voicing his own views but observing the constitutional principle that legislatures make the laws, not judges.

It was also noted, sotto voce, that Judge Alito would bring the total number of Catholics on the court to five, a majority on the nine-member panel.

Indeed, Washington now seems set for the eagerly awaited Supreme Court fight it was deprived of with both of Mr Bush’s earlier nominations.

John Roberts, who was confirmed as Chief Justice last month, was so well qualified and hard to pin down on contentious issues that his confirmation was not seriously contested. Ms Miers was so shockingly inadequate that Democrats never really got to take part in what became an intra-mural Republican squabble. With Judge Alito, both sides finally seem to have got the candidate they, and their political bases, wanted.

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