By Mark Mardell BBC chief political correspondent

Midnight has struck and Westminster is stuck.

For months now we have been told that the hands of the international clock stood at five minutes to midnight.

But now war is well underway politics inhabits an almost mystical space between tick and tock.

Tony Blair's future is in a sealed black box, its fate dependent on the unknowable.

Ministers, special advisors and spin doctors all live in this Limboland.

Talk to them and they say "We know what you know: we're watching the war live on TV."

On a personal level, for them and us, there is a weird stillness in Westminster: after the most frantic, most tense 10 days any of us can remember, the future of politics hangs of what happens in Baghdad.

The idea Tony Blair is a timid Machiavelli who only listens to focus groups was shot down over the skies of Baghdad.

The end of war will swell some existing tendencies.

Conservative MPs, the Conservative media and many Conservative voters no longer have a grudging respect for Tony Blair: they hero worship him, finding it difficult to oppose him.

They console themselves with the hope that he will bow out once the conflict is over.

The idea that he was a timid Machiavelli who only listened to focus groups was shot down over the skies of Baghdad.

Unthinkable

If the war goes well he may feel emboldened to tell the public that they are wrong about the euro as they were wrong about the war.

A referendum is unthinkable now according to political logic. But so was going to war against the opinion polls.

The Labour party never loved him, he was their tool and they his.

Mr Blair will have to desperately repair the broken slats before he disappears into the mid Atlantic

But now many party members feel he has betrayed them. It will need a grand gesture, adopting some flamboyantly Labour policies to win them round again.

If war goes well Tony Blair will achieve, to use an old abandoned phrase of the Third Way, the ultimate triangulation, standing way above his own political party and the opposition.

And way above Gordon Brown, the man most likely to fill his shoes when he eventually goes.

If war goes really badly, like Simon the magician, he will find that self belief is not more powerful than gravity and he will plunge to earth.

But the truth is likely to be a bit of a muddle, somewhere in between, the war won but with British troops struggling to maintain the peace, Mr Blair struggling to defend the new world order.

Dangers

As the main proponent of the cliche of Britain as a bridge between Europe and America Mr Blair will have to desperately repair the broken slats before he disappears into the mid Atlantic.

He warns of the dangers of a bipolar world, forced to choose between Bush's America Chirac's Europe.

But he too may be forced to choose, and his cabinet may be forced to choose. America's right wing radicals see Iraq as only the first target in their war on the axis of evil.

Mr Blair has suggested that many more rogue states have to be confronted.

Even the loyalist of ministers may baulk if he bounds into the cabinet saying "Right, its Syria next."

The hidden philosophy of this most pragmatic of politicians is going to be crucial in the years to come.