For two very different politicians thrown together by the trials of Northern Ireland, this has been a cruel summer. The peace process has forced Tony Blair and David Trimble into prolonged contact and lengthy meetings, some through the night, Fionnuala O Connor.
They are far from close, but at the moment they are sharing the season of no respite that comes to even the most successful or fortunate of party leaders, when luck takes a long walk.
The first definite sign that political fortunes have withered may be the sense of judgment gone: the next, logically enough, when mistakes or disasters start chasing each other. Mr Trimble's leadership of Ulster Unionism from the start has been so trying that even watchers weary.
Mr Blair's current trouble is more intense by contrast because the easy and sweeping victories seem suddenly long gone. The violent afterlife of the Iraq war has removed the last Blair sheen.
Bad enough that weapons of mass destruction failed to turn up: the steady unravelling of the case for war is worse. A public servant's lonely and self-inflicted death came as brutal comeuppance in the middle of what had seemed no more than arm-wrestling in the incestuous political-media village of Westminster.
Then successive days took the British Prime Minister from triumph, at least in the superficial terms of applause from the assembled members of Congress who saw him yet again outperform their President by embarrassing lengths, to a mauling by Chinese students and the punishment of unanswerable questions from the following pack of British journalists: "Have you got blood on your hands? Should you now resign?" The image of a wordless Blair will not be forgotten.
Spokespeople and media handlers sniffed that the Prime Minister wouldn't lend the questioners credibility by responding. But Peter Mandelson, "briefed to the hilt", went on the air and into print to hit the BBC again. Mr Blair denied that it was he who authorised release of David Kelly's name: the spotlight turned to Geoff Hoon, and on went the carnival of misjudgment.
The jostling of Mr Trimble on his tiny stage by rivals of little talent is much less dramatic, but still painful. For an academic lawyer given to vaunting his knowledge of the law and mastery of detail, it was bad enough when a senior judge found his first attempt to discipline his dissidents mismanaged and illegal.
There was a touch of farce when it emerged that the man tasked with preparation for another try at discipline, the party's chief executive and a former electoral officer, was about to be questioned by police about allegations of electoral office malpractice.
Though some of Mr Trimble's more enthusiastic media supporters insist that the Prime Minister greatly esteems the unionist leader, Mr Trimble undermines that portrayal. He makes no effort to conceal what appears to be a steadily growing dislike of "Blair", as he habitually refers to him, minus first name or title, even in formal speeches, a favourite Trimble form of displaying disrespect.
But this has nothing to do with war in Iraq or the Blair support for George Bush's foreign adventures. Mr Trimble supports both without reservation.
Most leading unionist politicians clearly think that gut unionist dislike and mistrust for almost all British politicians is a popular opinion to voice: better out than in. It may baffle observers elsewhere, like the routinely near-flattering Sinn Féin style of reference to Tony Blair. Inside Northern Ireland, the phenomenon is widely recognised.
The sight of a shaken Blair, of course, brings out opposite reactions from opposing camps, in which again opinions about the war in Iraq play little part. Most if not all political figures in unionism supported war, while nationalists in general were opposed.
To judge from conversations in shops and workplaces, radio phone-ins, newspaper letters pages, most nationalists think that Tony Blair made a mistake when he cancelled elections on the basis that the results would weaken David Trimble and thus the prospects of a more settled peace.
But then most nationalists also regard the peace as already more settled, and more valuable, than do most unionists.
Mr Trimble was in Washington to watch the Blair congressional address. As the applause continued, he was asked for a comment and was typically patronising and complimentary at the same time.
"He pressed all the right buttons for his audience, and there were some matters of substance in it," he said.
The twist, of course, is that Mr Blair has made such prolonged effort to sustain Mr Trimble. It will be neat, if not particularly fitting, if the many official attempts to keep the unionist leader in place, to "save Dave" as Sinn Féin dubbed the strategy, should finally come to nothing just as the would-be saviour loses his grip.