It was his last great role as an amateur actor. Tony Blair played Captain Stanhope in R.C. Sheriff's anti-war piece "Journey's End." In fact, he was Captain Stanhope. Blair managed to depict, movingly and realistically, the mental decline of an officer who uses barbed wire, flashing lights and plenty of whisky to turn the front into his personal playing field. The audience at the elite Fettes School near Edinburgh acknowledged Blair's performance with thundering applause. It was 1971. The optimistic young actor had just celebrated his eighteenth birthday and felt at ease in a role that depicts war as a gruesome trail of blood and suffering. Blair was a glowing pacifist.

He spent a little more time flirting with the idea of becoming an actor. By now, however, the 50-year-old Blair has long since shifted to the stage of international politics. The world is his theater, so to speak, and no one is likely to say that he would be satisfied with a supporting role. Nor would anyone believe that he is still the pacifist who opposed Maggie Thatcher's Falklands war in 1982. The man, whom some consider to be a superstar following in Churchill's footsteps and others see as nothing but a dubious charlatan, has sent more troops into war than any other British premier since World War II. Tony Blair has divided the public like no other European politician. When it comes to Iraq, he has become a diehard warrior, a professional in the business of "selling" military deployment as a necessary evil, even with questionable means.

"I've never forgotten Sheriff's play," Blair recently told "Times" journalist Peter Stothard, who spent 30 wartime days in March and April closely observing Blair. However, the politician has reinterpreted the playwright's pacifist message. What he now feels he has learned from Sheriff is that "the fact that people die because of your decisions is something you must face entirely on your own. You must isolate yourself and build barriers in your mind."

And what a journey this Tony Blair has just completed. It's as if even the gods couldn't decide whether he should continue to be their favorite or should be banned to Hades. All in one week.

On July 17, the British prime minister flew to Washington, where his speech before both houses of the US Congress was received as a triumph. Blair inspired the Americans as he eloquently confirmed their special role as a superpower and theatrically called upon them to "never apologize for your values!" The delegates gave Blair 19 standing ovations, especially in praise of those of his impressively worded passages that were largely uncritical of US policy. He was truly Tony the Triumphant.

But his triumph was to be short-lived. Just 24 hours later, as the British prime minister was en route to his next stop, Tokyo, he received the alarming news of the suicide of David Kelly, a scientist and critic of the Blair administration. Others traveling with him reported that Blair became "pale as a corpse." He immediately realized what this meant: that all the accusations about the elusive weapons of mass destruction were back on the table, but this time in a more serious form. The Prime Minister's entire Asia trip, which included stops in Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, was overshadowed by events at home. At a press conference in Tokyo, a reporter asked him: "Do you have blood on your hands?" The usually so eloquent Blair was suddenly silent, staring almost helplessly into space. The glowing international star had become a picture of misery: Blair the Disgraced.

The British press is proving to be even more malicious than ever. "The vultures are circling over Blair," finds the "Observer." The "Evening Standard" compares the Prime Minister to a "classic Mafia boss who holds his young child on his knee while issuing yet another order." And the opinion polls are devastating.

But Blair has quickly regained his composure in the wake of this setback. On this fateful week's emotional roller coaster, last Tuesday proved to be a more buoyant day, as the Prime Minister pointed to the death of Saddam's sons as clear evidence of the success of his policies. Blair is developing a new damage control concept:

He takes the offensive when dealing with journalists. He insists that claims that he authorized the public disclosure of Kelly's name, and therefore his exposure, are "completely untrue." He raises his voice as he speaks these words, which is a very rare occurrence, since Blair never raises his voice, no matter how stressed or attacked he feels. It's a character trait that even his best friends find uncanny.

Line of defense number two: We withdraw from the swamp of daily political embarrassments, and we set aside issues of who exaggerated what and where they did it. According to Blair, even if mistakes were made in the Iraq war, the overall outcome was positive: "I believe history will forgive us." Aside from the fact that this sentence almost precisely quotes Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro, not exactly one of Blair's closest associates, it is of course convenient: History only passes judgement once a great deal of distance has been established. It does not demand ad hoc removal from office. It provides some breathing space.

Clare Short, in speaking with Der Spiegel, calls this "typical Blair hubris." Like former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, she resigned from the cabinet in protest of the Iraq war. As Blair's political ally of many years, her assessment of the Prime Minister is devastating: "His strengths are his charm and his presentation, but he is weak in terms of content and not particularly interested in details. Blair loves the grand stage and believes he can bring people together."

If this is the case, what could have prompted this gifted, instinctual politician, the master of the middle road, the supposedly so impartial political director, to put his carrier on the line over the unpopular Iraq war?

"Our politically ambitious father's stroke, our mother's cancer lie at the beginning of his ambition and sense of obligation," says Bill Blair, his older brother. "He wanted and still wants to do the right thing."

To satisfy his conservative parents' expectations, Tony studies law. But first he gives himself a little time off as guitarist and singer in the band Ugly Rumours (specializing in Mick Jagger imitations), letting his hair grow to his shoulders and wearing hippie clothing. But he rebels against nothing and no one, stays away from drugs, even from the hashish that's so common in the music scene. On Sundays, when the other band members sleep in, Tony goes to church and distributes church pamphlets.

While studying law at Oxford, he meets the ambitious Cherie Booth, who dreams of becoming the first female prime minister, but then becomes the wife of the future prime minister. Both attempt to gain election to parliament as members of the Labour Party, and Tony Blair is successful on his second attempt.

He refuses to commit himself ideologically. He is most convinced by the theories of Scottish philosopher John Macmurray, who views the family as a focus of society and politics, with government and opposition, as the classic means of conflict resolution. According to Macmurray, citizens should come together in communities and help one another, primarily of their own accord. "But I have no political guru," says Blair in a 1995 interview with Der Spiegel. He tries his hand as a sort of political one-man outfit, as a reconciler of opposing points of view. He is a crusader constantly in search of a crusade worth pursuing, in search of a great moral challenge.

His third approach, imbued with such phrases as "New Labour, New Britain," revolutionizes the party, which has become bogged down in outdated formulas, and cuts the conservatives to the quick. Blair directly addresses the concerns and needs of his citizens. He wants to make the cities safer by beefing up the police force and imposing stricter penalties on criminal activity, but he also promises to combat the origins of crime. He brings together what are seemingly irreconcilable goals: greater fiscal discipline and larger social expenditures.

"Trust me," is the slogan of the postmodern politician, who builds on nothing more effectively than his personal persuasiveness, who gives the impression of being as gentle as a deer, someone who wishes to do no one harm and is loved by all, earning himself the nickname "Bambi." In 1997, Blair achieves an overwhelming victory at the polls, a feat he is able to repeat almost as convincingly in 2001.

He enjoys a few successes at the beginning of his first term. He energizes the economy, he strengthens the regions, and he establishes a talking relationship with all parties involved in the Northern Ireland conflicts. But he is just as unable to gain control over the catastrophic healthcare system as the public transportation network, where conditions are reminiscent of those in third-world countries. And it soon becomes evident that not all opposites can be "harmonized." One is either for or against the introduction of the Euro (in spite of being in favor of the Euro, Blair shies away from a popular referendum). One is either America's obedient lapdog (England's Association of Poodle Breeders considers the much-used poodle analogy as slander of its four-legged friends) or one stands up against the United States and proclaims one's independent views.

It is not particularly surprising that this Briton gets along well with Bill Clinton. They are both babyboomers, eloquent tribunes of the people with strong wives. But the relationship between Tony Blair and George W. Bush is probably the oddest since Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon came together as the "Odd Couple." The arch-conservative, mundane rancher, a man of simple sentences, and the liberal, worldly proponent of the big city, an extraordinarily gifted speaker. They truly have little in common.

At their first meeting in February 2001, the normally well-dressed Blair deliberately wears casual clothing to please his shirt-sleeved host at Camp David. At their joint press conference, he almost begins to stutter out of sympathy for his counterpart. A reporter asks what brings the two men together. "We both use Colgate toothpaste," Bush responds cryptically. But Blair is unable to resist a typically quick-witted response: "George, now everyone will ask how you know that."

What the two men have in common is their belief in God, their missionary fervor. No one knows whether Blair suffers from a "Jesus complex" ("The Spectator"). Unlike Bush, the Briton does not like to talk about his experiences of being reborn and his reading of the bible. "That's private," he says. But he once wrote that to him Jesus is "a modernizer." Lord Jenkins, Tony Blair's mentor of many years, interprets this as follows: "For my taste, the Prime Minister does not have too few but rather too many inner certainties, particularly with respect to issues of global politics. He is a Manichaean. Everything stands in stark contrast between good and evil. This is why he firmly believes that good must automatically follow from the conquest of evil."