But by last year’s conference, he had survived and was focused on how to win the election.

Amateur constitutionalists pronounced gravely on how it was unprecedented for a prime minister to term-limit himself in this way: that it would weaken him and power would start to drain away. It seems, at the end of 2003, that he began to plan for the possibility, with the Hutton and Butler reports before him, of standing down. The heart business turned out to be exactly what he said it was – minor – while the house was evidence, a bit like thunder, of something that had happened some time before. Tony Blair’s tactic of pre-announcing his departure from No 10 has worked.

John Reid and Alan Milburn, among others, strenuously argued against it. Sally Morgan, his chief political adviser who left Downing Street at the election, was among those who argued in favour. If re-elected, he said, he would serve a full third term, but he would not lead the party into a fourth election. It was a puzzling announcement at the time, a year ago this week, after the annual conference in Bournemouth had folded its display stands – not least because it was combined with two others. One was that he was to undergo a minor operation to correct his heart flutter. No doubt an announcement now by Tony Blair of a firm date (say, mid-summer 2006) for the withdrawal of British forces from Iraq would incur similar odium in Washington. But if Attlee could brave such odium at a time when Britain stood in desperate need of American economic and strategic support, then Blair could certainly do so today when Britain stands in no comparable need.Unlike Attlee, however, Blair suffers from profound personal handicaps – a limitless capacity for self-delusion born of an ineffable vanity – that will surely prevent him from knowing when to retreat and daring to do it..

The other was that he and Cherie had bought a £3.6m house near Marble Arch. In Palestine the British withdrawal in 1948 was the signal for all-out war between the new state of Israel and its Arab neighbours – another mass slaughter in which, again, not a British life was lost.Of course, Attlee’s decisions were denounced by political opponents at home as “scuttle”, while the ending of the Palestine mandate caused much odium in Washington. In both cases Britain was (unlike in Iraq today) legally the sovereign authority, for Britain governed Palestine under a League of Nations mandate, and India as part of the British Empire. It was therefore far more politically daunting for Attlee to abdicate British rule in these countries than for Blair simply to withdraw British forces from Iraq.Yet there was no pious Blair-style nonsense about staying on in India or Palestine out of a moral obligation to the inhabitants. Instead, Attlee decided with quiet ruthlessness that Britain’s own interests must come first. So when it proved impossible to negotiate compromise political settlements between Jew and Arab for the future of Palestine, and between Hindu and Moslem for the future of a united India, Attlee simply announced firm dates when Britain would cease to govern, haul down the Union flag, and begin to evacuate her armed forces.In India the end of British rule in 1947 ushered in a period of mass migrations of Hindus and Muslims coupled with dreadful communal massacres – but not a British life was lost.

But is Blair enough of a realist to face the fact that the time has come for retreat? And, if so, has he the moral courage to dare to give the order – especially as it would mean publicly acknowledging that his war has constituted the greatest blunder committed by a British prime minister in modern times?Blair should look for inspiration to the tough decisions reached by his truly great predecessor Clem Attlee over India in 1947 and Palestine in 1947-48. How does a leader know just when? He knows it when his current strategy is failing to produce the hoped-for results, but on the contrary is running ever deeper into difficulties and danger, and yet with the final result all in doubt.This is surely the present case with Tony Blair’s Iraq policy. The Duke of Wellington once opined that the best test of a great general is “to know when to retreat and to dare to do it”. We have just had John Reid, Blair’s Glasgow glasser, proclaiming that “we will not wave the white flag, and cut and run”.But “to cut and run” would in fact be the morally brave thing to do. And what is their response? It is to resort to windy rhetoric about staying in Iraq “as long as it takes”. When Iraqi ambushes succeed, the resulting loss and grief falls disproportionately on the small suburban or rural community in America whence the particular unit came.