Yet Blair’s hold on the coattails of President George W. Bush does not seem to be relaxing. The White House remains bent on war and British forces are going to be fighting alongside the Americans, regardless of the serious doubts of many British legislators and the wider British public, over a million of whom turned out recently in what was the country’s largest ever peace time demonstration.

Blair is taking a substantial political risk. Insiders privately acknowledge that many of his Labour Party colleagues only supported the war vote on the understanding that there would have to be a further UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force against Saddam’s regime. If such assurance were given in the hours of arm-twisting to which Labour legislators were subjected in advance of the vote, they would appear to be in conflict with the British government’s assertions that, legally, there are already grounds for an attack.

There remains an outside chance that the British are playing a clever, if dangerous, game. Having persuaded Bush to seek a second Security Council vote, Blair may be hoping that failure to achieve this will obviate the need for war.

He may be further calculating that Saddam will at the last minute cave in to UN inspectors and produce a full inventory of his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Evidence for this analysis comes from foreign minister Jack Straw’s mantra that history has shown credible threats of force to be the only way to make Saddam Hussein meet his international obligations. In that calculation he could be seriously wrong.

There are two further factors which will undermine any such cunning British diplomacy. The first is the possibility that Iraq really does not have any more banned weaponry. The resistance that the UN inspectors are encountering is informed chiefly by the determination of a sovereign country to preserve its dignity.

The second factor could be more overwhelming. It is that a US-led invasion of Iraq will be unfinished Bush family business. Bush wants Saddam’s head on a plate and not even the diplomatic concerns of his only real ally, Tony Blair, are going to deflect him. The British leader is about to climb on the back of a tiger.

The only thing he has going for him is that the Conservative opposition is backing his warmongering. Were his own party to fall apart if war goes ahead without UN Security Council backing, he may be hoping that because the Conservative leader Ian Duncan Smith has endorsed the war, his government may be able to survive.

It is significant, however, that veteran Conservative politician Kenneth Clarke broke rank with his party and voted against war. Clarke, who has already made two bids for his party’s leadership, would be strongly placed to take over from the unpopular Duncan Smith.

Under his leadership, the Conservatives could be set to sweep away the ruins of a divided Labour and oust a Blair government humbled by the chaos following a war.