This is all about Don Tony:

and it’s personal, not business Matthew d’Ancona says that the Jowell Affair has revealed the loneliness of New Labour’s once-omnipotent Godfather, as the Cameron and Brown families prepare for their own bloody turf war when he is gone One evening at dinner with Tessa Jowell and David Mills, Tony Blair spotted an unsightly paint stain outside their Kentish Town house. The Culture Secretary explained that antiwar protesters had discovered her address, and had poured out the paint to signal their disgust. Mr Blair shook his head. ‘Do people really do things like that?’ he asked.

Yes, Prime Minister, they do. But one of the many things he and Ms Jowell have in common is a distaste for ugliness: they like things to be just so, for decorum to be observed. And it baffled Mr Blair that anyone should resort to such vulgar behaviour to make a political point, even when the issue was one as divisive as the Iraq war.

It is hard to exaggerate how closely allied Ms Jowell and the Prime Minister have been during the New Labour era. The strength of their partnership is one of the underreported facts of politics in the past 12 years — an omission which has pleased them.

They are carved from the same timber, these two politicians: north London, Christian, incorrigibly middle-class. Much more than Tony and Gordon, or even Tony and Peter, Tony and Tessa speak the same language, experience the same sentiments, inhabit the same moral and aesthetic universe. Others — Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell — have been more influential in the day-to-day development of New Labour strategy, and have spent more time with Mr Blair, bending his ear and writing his lines. But Ms Jowell has been a confidante of a different order, and the best kind: one who does not boast about the fact.

It was she, more than any other Cabinet minister, who urged the Prime Minister not to resign in 2004, not to give in to the Chancellor; only Mr Blair’s wife was more influential in this campaign of persuasion. On the day of the European and local elections in June of that year, he phoned her from the G8 summit in Sea Island, Georgia, to thank her. When her brother died of cancer a few months later, Mrs Blair was on hand to take her to tea in New York, and to pass her over to the Prime Minister on her mobile. Most recently, it was Ms Jowell who convinced him to gamble on the Olympics — and delivered. Hours after that triumph, he deputed her to comfort the families bereaved by the 7 July atrocities.

So her ordeal in the past fortnight has been more painful for the Prime Minister than any assault upon his court apart from ‘Cheriegate’ itself. His reassurances to the Culture Secretary have not been routine in character: they have been emphatic, angry, contra mundum in spirit. He knows that Ms Jowell has been his alter ego in what is really an attack upon him. And, these days, there are not many bodies left to take a bullet on his behalf.

‘I never thought I’d say this,’ a loyalist Labour MP told me, ‘but we really have reached the bunker stage of the Blair years.’ It is a predictable image: the last, doomed loyalists huddling around their demented leader, handing out medals to children, as the sound of approaching gunfire draws closer by the hour.

Yet the analogy is not quite right. What is happening to the Prime Minister and his circle more closely resembles the fading of a Mafia family. In his den in Downing Street, the Don of New Labour sits and broods like Al Pacino in the last, unforgettable scene of The Godfather Part II.

‘One by one, our old friends are gone,’ Johnny Ola muses to Michael Corleone earlier in the film. ‘Death — natural or not prison, deported.’ So it has been for Mr Blair as he has watched his capos being picked off, or politically crippled. Mandelson, Campbell, Blunkett, Milburn, Byers: they have all been taken out, some of them twice. The Blair famiglia still controls most of the action in Westminster and Whitehall, the rackets and the numbers. But the operation is a shadow of its former self. With each passing day, the Brown and Cameron families encroach upon its territory, destined for their own bloody turf war when Don Tony finally calls it a day. Melancholy shadows draw in around the Prime Minister: the blazing sunlight of 2 May 1997 is a very distant memory.

In the dying of that light, the Jowell Affair will be remembered as a very important moment. It showed Mr Blair both at his loneliest and his most determined. It showed that the decline of any premiership follows a script, in which public boredom conspires with political error to draw the drama to a close. And it showed how desperate many people now are to be rid of the Prime Minister whose aggregate record at general elections exceeds even Margaret Thatcher’s.

Two of the lines of attack upon Ms Jowell have made political sense. First, there has been the entirely legitimate wish to scrutinise the behaviour of a prominent Cabinet minister whose husband — now estranged — stands accused of taking a £350,000 bribe from Silvio Berlusconi.

Long before her present travails, Ms Jowell liked to tell colleagues of a recurring nightmare she has, in which she fails to register a company directorship. To some, this dream will doubtless smack of a guilty conscience. The Culture Secretary’s defenders — including officials who have worked with her — say it reflects precisely the opposite: an almost obsessive preoccupation with full disclosure, and a fear of any conflict of interests that might damage the government’s or her own reputation.

But if Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion, then so must Tessa. These, after all, were the rules New Labour itself set when it was savaging the Tories over ‘sleaze’. It was Mr Blair himself who said that his government must be ‘purer than pure’, and could not afford to be seen to behave ‘like the last lot’. He and his allies can scarcely object that they have been taken at their word.

What is manifest is that the present mech anisms for investigating such cases must be overhauled. Sir Gus O’Donnell is universally acknowledged as a tough and incorruptible defender of Whitehall’s integrity: he could find no evidence of wrongdoing. Sir Philip Mawer, the parliamentary commissioner for standards, concluded that Ms Jowell did not have to amend her entry in the parliamentary register with respect to the £350,000 payment to Mr Mills that was ultimately treated by the Revenue as earnings rather than a ‘gift’. Yet neither investigation drew a line under the affair.

Since the Nolan report in 1995 there has been a long quest to find procedures for policing standards in public life that command respect and confidence. It is clearer than ever that the parliamentary standards watchdog was right three years ago to call for the delegation of such cases as Ms Jowell’s to a new independent adviser, assisted by a panel of experts. We have long passed the point where ministers and their officials were trusted as regulators. The status quo is not an option if our political class is truly serious about restoring public confidence in its conduct.

The second, more brutal assault has been to use Ms Jowell as a proxy for the Prime Minister. For those who regard Mr Blair as the spawn of Beelzebub, and New Labour as morally bankrupt, the opportunity to get the Prime Minister’s best friend via her husband has been heaven-sent: a pretext to pursue a culture war by other means. From this perspective, the Jowell Affair has been personal, not business. Mr Mills’s murky financial entanglements — his alleged links with the shadiest Italian businessmen and even the Mob itself — have presented Mr Blair’s fiercest critics with what they have been dreaming of for years: a New Labour Whitewater.

Just as Bill Clinton’s impeachment began life as an investigation into an allegedly crooked land deal in Arkansas, so there are high hopes that crooked deals uncovered in Italy will lead to the very heart of the Blair regime, and revenge for those still affronted by the election result of 1997. And this is one reason why Mr Mills agreed to a separation from his wife: as long as he was by her side, there was every chance that the media-friendly Milanese prosecutors would leak some fresh allegation to the press so lurid and shocking that the entire British government would be contaminated by association. Mr Mills maintains his innocence of all allegations and believes his name will be cleared. But he knows the Italian system well enough to realise that the worst may still be to come. Now that he is separated from Ms Jowell, there is some chance of damage limitation, and a cutting of the cord that links his case to the inner offices of No. 10. But only a chance.

For those weary of sleaze and those who have always been allergic to Blair, Ms Jowell has been an obvious target. The strangest reaction has been that of those Labour backbenchers who still regard affluence as inherently immoral, and one woman’s wealth as another man’s poverty. For this puritan tendency, Mr Mills’s mere association with figures such as Silvio Berlusconi — legitimate or not — is sufficient grounds for his wife’s exclusion from high office in a Labour government. Let us be clear: for MPs like Peter Kilfoyle and Glenda Jackson, the issue is not crime but conspicuous consumption. As Mr Kilfoyle, a former defence minister, put it: ‘Pushing money into offshore hedge funds is not the Labour way.’ How quickly a party in office forgets how it got there: it was only when Labour ditched the politics of envy, embraced wealth-creation and stopped demonising the rich that it started to win elections. Many of those Labour MPs who have been cursing Ms Jowell would not be MPs at all if not for this fundamental change in their party’s public philosophy. Some of them still have chips on both shoulders: they want to squeeze the Cabinet until the pips squeak.

I understand those who believe Ms Jowell’s conduct has raised important ethical issues about standards in public life. Nor is it hard to grasp why those who loathe and demonise Mr Blair should seize with such relish upon her errors.

What is incomprehensible is the desire of so many in the Labour party to destroy him, and those they see as his creatures. He has delivered them unprecedented electoral success. He has promised that he will not stand again. And yet many in his own party are so deluded that they believe his enforced departure — his humiliation will profit them politically. They should watch a recording of his recent polished performance on Parkinson and ask themselves, seriously, if anyone could do a better job as their leader. But they won’t.

Such is the psychosis of politics. The Conservative party will not miss Mr Blair. Nor will those who want to see a serious centre-Right government get on with the task of public service reform that Mr Blair has fumbled in so many respects. But you can bet the mortgage on this: the Labour party will live to regret its behaviour in these months, the recklessness with which it has squandered its assets. The days of Don Tony are drawing to a close; the olive groves of retirement beckon. But the troubles of the famiglia he will leave behind are only just beginning.