SUDDENLY, Tony Blair doesn't look young any more. His features are pinched and drawn, his complexion sallow. Even his hairline seems to have receded a little further. A persistent fluey cold can't help, but strain and fatigue exude from each pore. Although he insists that every waking hour is spent fighting to get a second (or 18th, depending on your point of view) United Nations resolution authorising military action against Iraq, the onset of hostilities may come as a relief. The war may be hell, but at least it will end this purgatory.

The worst week so far of Mr Blair's tenure in office began late on Sunday evening when Clare Short, the cabinet minister responsible for dispensing Britain's rather generous overseas aid budget, said on a radio programme that if Britain joined America in attacking Iraq without a second resolution, she would quit the government. On its own, that would have been bad enough, but not wholly surprising. Mr Blair has licensed her outspokenness in the past—only recently she described his policy on university fees as “a very bad idea”—and might have been able to turn a blind eye again had she left it there. “Clare is Clare,” as Downing Street used to say. But once Ms Short got going there was no stopping her: “The whole atmosphere of the current situation is deeply reckless, reckless for the world, reckless for the undermining of the UN...reckless with our government, reckless with his own future, position and place in history.”

Despite one of the most flagrant breaches of cabinet collective responsibility in recent memory, Ms Short neither resigned nor was sacked. While loyalist ministers queued up to express poorly feigned surprise at Ms Short's “timing” and “self-indulgence”, Downing Street insisted that the prime minister was too busy telephoning “world leaders” about that second resolution to deal with Ms Short just yet. But few doubted that the real reason was that with backbench MPs becoming daily more rebellious, the whips had advised that instead of making a martyr out of Ms Short, Mr Blair would do better to leave her “to swing in the wind”.

Ms Short's intervention set in motion a train of newspaper stories about moves to topple Mr Blair. Left-wingers who have always detested him began talking excitedly about getting together the 83 MPs (20% of the parliamentary party) needed to trigger a vote at the party conference in October on whether to hold a leadership election. There are circumstances in which Mr Blair's position could become untenable (see article), but nobody sensible thinks a formal challenge is remotely likely. The Labour Party, unlike the fratricidal Tories, hardly ever gets rid of its leaders. George Lansbury, who got the push in 1935, is the only one ever to have been truly forced out—ironically, for resisting calls to arm against Hitler.

Far more worrying for Mr Blair was President Jacques Chirac's pledge on French television to veto any new resolution tabled by the British and the Americans at the UN, no matter what the circumstances. As the week wore on, the government's mantra that it was “working flat out” to secure the second resolution began to sound increasingly frantic. More and more, Mr Blair looked like a man caught between growing American impatience with its ally's frenzied but fruitless diplomacy, and the determination of the French and Russians to shoot down any compromise proposed by the British.

The prime minister's isolation was driven home by his appearance on a television programme, “Tonight with Trevor McDonald”. The all-female audience had been hand-picked to devastating effect. It included one woman whose boyfriend had been killed by the Bali bomb, another who had lost an only son in the World Trade Centre and another whose husband is a human shield in Iraq. All were passionately anti-war. At the end, something unprecedented happened: as Mr Blair looked uneasily round the studio, the audience began a slow handclap. Downing Street didn't even bother to complain.

Just when it looked as if things couldn't get worse, late on the evening of March 11th, Donald Rumsfeld struck. The American defence secretary is not always the most subtle press conference performer. But his answer to a question about what America would do if the British decided that in the absence of a second resolution they would not join an attack on Iraq, was more than usually unhelpful. Oh well, said Mr Rumsfeld, naturally there were “work-arounds” if the British couldn't be there because of the vagaries of their parliamentary democracy.

Within seconds, prime ministerial aides hit the phones and were demanding that Mr Rumsfeld issue a “clarification”. Nothing had altered; if it came to war, the sturdy British were as ready as ever to do their bit. But it was exactly the ammunition the prime minister's domestic critics needed. Did it not show that all the talk of “influence” was bunk, for the Americans would go to war whatever we did? And if the Americans were already planning to do without British forces at the sharp end, why not gratefully take that as a way out?

A final British attempt mid-week to put forward a resolution that, by setting a series of tests for the Iraqis to meet, might get at least a majority of Security Council support seemed to owe more to desperation than to a strong expectation of success. With the Americans insisting on an early deadline, Tony Blair faces the prospect of going to war not only without the legal cover of explicit UN authorisation, but also in opposition to the views of a majority of his own MPs. His only consolation is that it should all be over soon. One way or another.