A Good Man Falls Hard

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It was a weird, sad exit for an honorable public servant. British Home Secretary David Blunkett, the country's chief law-enforcement officer, had no choice but to resign when an inquiry unearthed an e-mail and fax showing his office had helped speed up a residency permit for his ex-lover's nanny. The offense was tiny — the nanny was entitled to the permit anyway — but Blunkett had insisted there had been no intervention at all. (He later said he had forgotten the e-mail and fax.) Several missteps had steered him toward this patch of political quicksand. The public seemed willing to forgive his three-year affair with a married woman — his hardscrabble background, blindness and gift for straight talk bought him sympathy — but worried that his judgment had become skewed when he went to court to demand access to his lover's 2-year-old boy, who Blunkett says is his son. An authorized biography full of nasty remarks about his Cabinet colleagues was released as his troubles mounted, making enemies when he needed friends. One day after he attended the Christmas party of backbench Labour M.P.s and awkwardly sang the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers standard Pick Yourself Up, he was forced to dust himself off and start all over again.

Charles Clarke, the bruising former Education Secretary and close buddy of Prime Minister Tony Blair, will replace Blunkett. He has a big job: Blair is grounding his re-election campaign this year on the security agenda Clarke now runs, including controversial compulsory ID cards. But the day after Blunkett quit, the country's highest court sank one of his toughest law-and-order legacies. It voted 8-1 that foreign terror suspects could no longer be detained indefinitely without trial, because the emergency the government declared to square this with European human rights law was invalid, and indefinite detention too extreme. Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights organization Liberty, called it "the most important constitutional decision in recent history." Lacking Blunkett's personal stake in this reversal, Clarke may find it easier to manage a nimble recovery — and, perhaps, soften the authoritarian instinct of which Blunkett's Home Office was so often accused.