“LOOKING back, more should have been done,” says Congressman Tom Reynolds in his latest campaign advert. “And for that,” he adds, looking like a man who has to force the words out of his mouth, “I am sorry.”

The subject he is talking about is the Capitol Hill scandal in which Mark Foley, the disgraced Republican Congressman, sent sexually explicit computer messages to teenage male interns. Mr Reynolds is spending about $200,000 (£100,000) on the TV adverts in the hope that his apology will save his skin in the mid-term Congressional elections next month.

It is, by any measure, an extraordinary position for one of Washington’s biggest beasts to find himself in. Mr Reynolds is in charge of the Republican campaign for the House of Representatives, where he is responsible for protecting the party’s 15-seat majority.

A fortnight ago he seemed to be coasting to re-election in this seemingly solid Republican district in the west of New York state. But a recent opinion poll suggests that his Democratic opponent has opened up a double-digit lead, leaving Mr Reynolds fighting to save not only Republican control of the House but also his career.

Outside his campaign headquarters yesterday on a dreary industrial estate in Amhurst, the rain was tipping down. Inside, Lawrence “LD” Platt, the head of communications, was struggling with a flu bug — which, he says, has been “shared” with the Congressman — while being bombarded with messages on three computers and two mobile telephones. Somehow, it did not seem the right moment to make a bad joke about how such technology has not done his party many favours in recent days.

Mr Reynolds is in the frame on the Foley scandal because, by his own admission, he learnt about “odd — but not explicit — e-mails” last spring. This was around the time that he asked Mr Foley to stand again in his Florida district. And it was certainly before he accepted $100,000 from the Congressman for Republican campaign funds, money that Mr Reynolds refuses to hand back. On top of this, Mr Reynolds’s chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, has been forced to resign after it emerged that he had tried to help Mr Foley, a long-standing friend and his former boss, by offering ABC News a deal under which it would not publish the sex messages. Mr Reynolds suffered widespread ridicule for holding a press conference last week where he surrounded himself with young children of supporters, prompting reporters to complain that in such circumstances they were unable to ask him about the sexually charged computer messages. The Democrats muttered about Mr Reynolds using “kids as human shields”.

Mr Platt acknowledged that the Foley scandal had been an unexpected “rock in the road”. But he was adamant that “this will not be the issue which determines the outcome of this race”. He believes that the Republican machine, combined with the hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding that Mr Reynolds has secured for this economically rundown district, will matter more.

Attempts to change the subject have not, however, been helped by unedifying buck-passing. Mr Hastert and Mr Reynolds have helped to keep the scandal at the top of news bulletins for almost two weeks by taking it in turns to contradict each other. In one version of his TV advert, Mr Reynolds delivers another dig at the Speaker, saying, “I trusted that others had investigated”.

The Democrats were initially slow to capitalise. John Gerken, the campaign manager, explained that this was because Jack Davis, their 73-year-old candidate who has sunk $2million of his own money into the campaign, had been determined to fight on his chosen ground of opposition to free trade. The irascible Mr Davis owns a local factory and was a libertarian Republican until he was “kicked out of a Reynolds fund-raiser in 2004 after daring to talk to Dick Cheney (the Vice-President) about his concerns over trade”.

But this week Mr Davis, having spent fully ten days staring into the gift horse’s mouth, began running a TV advert showing shadowy pictures of Mr Reynolds and alleging that he had kept quiet despite knowing “the truth for months” about Mr Foley’s behaviour.

The Reynolds campaign fulminates about “misleading claims” that seek to “confuse voters” by blending the e-mails with the much more sexually charged computer messages. But if he survives the election, he may now be a tainted brand.

Don Sherwood, another Congressman who has had to broadcast an advert in which he denies trying to choke his mistress, has disinvited Mr Reynolds from attending a coming campaign event. This is partly, explained a spokesman, because of the Foley factor.

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