He has so few followers, yet Blair has never been a more believable leader

His path, in his mind, is truly the path of righteousness. What a paradox it will be if this is the path he gets lost on

People seem genuinely mystified about how Tony Blair, consummate communicator and superb politician, got himself into his present perilous, position. We observe, amazed, the sacrifices he appears willing to make in order to support the United States in its deeply opportunistic desire to invade Iraq. We see, quite clearly, that among those sacrifices he is prepared to include himself.

As if that wasn't the least of it. How can he be willing to defy international opinion and our European partners? How can he so carelessly alienate voters, divide his parliamentary party and drive away Labour members? How can he dismiss the view of the churches he worships in? How can he fail to read significance into the fact that he has not even kept his Cabinet in line?

He is vilified as the "honourable member for south Texas", slow-handclapped by members of the public on live television and treated as a useful idiot by the right-wing fundamentalists of the US government. He is willing to ignore the position of the United Nations and of Nato and to dismiss the idea that his job, above all, is to represent the democratic will of his country.

Red-eyed, exhausted, punch-drunk, he faces the relatives of those who have died in terrorist outrages, as they plead with him not to continue on his course in the names of their lost loved ones, or the exiles of Iraq as they beg him not to main and kill their countrymen just because they have had the appalling luck to have as their leader a cruel dictator.

All of this, he shrugs off. In the end, all he can tell them is that Saddam is a menace, that he knows he is right in his view, and that history will be his judge. He was, he declares – supremely unaware that these claims remain highly contentious – right about Kosovo and right about Afghanistan. The pattern will continue with this latest adventure.

It is quite a spectacle this, the sight of a political leader acting out of nothing but pure, unadulterated conviction. While it is cold comfort indeed to remind ourselves that we haven't seen this since Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, it is mesmerising, all the same, to watch such awesome blind integrity in action.

It is a measure of just how unused we are to seeing a politician making decisions with no thought of personal gain, political advantage or popular acclaim (though perhaps with an eye to his place in history), that this in itself is seen so universally by Mr Blair's opponents as entirely a weakness. What kind of point, for example, did the Liberal Democrat MP, Vincent Cable, think he was making at Prime Minister's Questions the other day?

He asked about contract handouts in post-war Iraq, which have all been awarded to US companies supportive of Bush. The implication is that Mr Blair is a mug to want so much to take part in a war that offers him no economic payback. The reality is that it is entirely to Mr Blair's credit that he will not stoop to such corrupt and sickening blandishments, while at the same time promoting "just war".

What an innocent idealist Mr Blair has turned out to be. He cannot engage with suggestions that the US is being imperialistic, seeking geopolitical gain, fighting for cheap oil, enjoying the display of its power and cynically using 11 September as a cover to settle old scores, because none of this is in any way part of his own justification for his decisions. His path, in his mind, is truly the path of righteousness. What a paradox it will be if this is the path he gets lost on.

I've never been an admirer of Mr Blair. For me, his reputation as a "consummate politician" was nothing to be respected. His creed, it seemed to me, was compromise, and calculated compromise at that. His party's reliance on style over substance, on spin, on focus groups, on vote-catching, all of this stank of a party and a man who led, too often, not out of conviction but from mere expediency.

The policies he adopted seldom came from the gut, but were shaped by other considerations – how attractively they could be presented to Middle England, yet at the same time appeal to the unions; how they could confound the opposition, not by challenging them, but by second-guessing them; how quickly they could be totted up, published with fanfare and then claimed to be producing instant, discernible, positive results.

Any conversations that Mr Blair was having with the nation – "and I say to you" – he was having with himself as well. He understood how to win people round, because he had already invested a great deal of thought in winning himself round.

But with this issue, Mr Blair has not had a conversation with himself. He has simply assumed that because for him the case is unanswerable, it therefore will be so for everyone else whom he has managed to win round before. He needed no persuasion, and so surely no persuasion was necessary for him to achieve the mandate he had come to expect.

Even now, when it has become pretty obvious that much persuasion is needed, and that no amount of time will get him anywhere, there is a part of Tony Blair that cannot absorb this. On his seemingly endless televisual confrontations with members of the public, he still manages to look totally ambushed and completely shocked by some of the questions, even though we know that he has been asked them again and again and again.

Yet while many critics point to arrogance and hubris as being at the root of the Prime Minister's plight, I cannot help feeling that there is more to it than that. For all the discomfort that he should be feeling, Mr Blair clearly takes a huge amount of strength from his certainty – a certainty that amounts to faith. There is something oddly splendid in his isolation. In a strange way, Mr Blair has never been a more believable leader than at this time, when so few are following him.

His provocative stance has inspired impassioned debate, thoughtful researches, heartfelt passion. A million people have never materialised on a British street in support of any conviction before, but many more than a million found a voice in order to challenge the myopia of a man who believes that good intentions alone can justify even the most grotesque of conflicts.

Therefore, whether one believes him to be right or to be wrong, Mr Blair's example, of unswerving commitment, uncompromised by its threat to his leadership, and unchanged by the disapproval of the voters, can be argued as having provided a focus and a touchstone for a nation that had until recently been slipping ever more into political apathy.

We may yet find that the nation has been refreshed and inspired by its experience of this leader, who is wrong but morally honest, rather than the old one who may have been right, but didn't quite come across as absolutely convinced of that himself. As a political act, Blair's unconditional support for this war has been reckless indeed. But at least – at last – he's risen above political acting. For this, he deserves respect.

d.orr@independent.co.uk