THE PRIME MINISTER.(UK prime minister Tony Blair)

In London, the cultural draw of the season has been the Titian exhibition at the National Gallery. The curators have gathered paintings that have not hung together for more than four hundred years, and the galleries are staying open four evenings a week to accommodate the throng. Visitors who pause before "The Death of Actaeon,"in which a tumbling figure, half man, half deer, is savaged by pursuing hounds, could be forgiven for murmuring under their breath, "There goes Tony.”

The Prime Minister has been more besieged of late than at any time since he took office, in 1997. Actaeon got it in the neck because he caught sight of Diana enjoying a dip. There is no official record of Blair's having encountered George W. Bush in his bath, but the British leader is now paying the price, in a Europe newly suspicious of American motives, for treating the President both as an ally and as a friend. Saddam Hussein reputedly used a squad of look-alikes to take his place at sticky moments, a tactic that Blair may well have envied when, nine days before the onset of hostilities, he--and it was definitely he--entered a television studio that bristled with women voters. Daniel himself would have gazed with pity as they clawed at Blair's explanations for Britain's entry into the war. At the end, they put their paws together for a slow handclap.

This was an astounding reversal of fortune. It would be unfair to say that Tony Blair possesses feminine charms, but the platform on which he came to power--listening to the voice of the people, answering what he took to be their needs--was perhaps the least manly ever proposed by a British premier. Now, almost six years later, the voice of the people had risen to a screech. His appeal to young voters took a knock when thousands of children--schoolkids, not college rebels--grabbed an unscheduled day off and raged onto the streets. Whatever the point of New Labour had once been, it surely wasn't supposed to end with cops carting off truculent schoolgirls in Parliament Square.

But Blair saw his chance. If your electorate turns into an unruly classroom, then, as any battle-hardened professor will confirm, the correct course of action is not to inquire politely into the students' feelings but to tell them what you are going to do and then do it. So the Prime Minister rose to his feet in ...