Christmas cannot come too soon for Tony Blair. He could do with a good dinner after a week of eating humble pie. The most devoutly Christian British prime minister since Gladstone is no stranger to humility: after all, Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. Still, Mr. Blair could be forgiven for feeling that that having to give Jacques Chirac a pedicure is one good deed too many.

The meek are supposed to inherit the earth, but just now Mr. Blair must be wishing he had never inherited the famous European budget rebate that Margaret Thatcher negotiated in 1984. The rebate was originally supposed to redress the injustice of British taxpayers subsidizing French farmers to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year. Even with the rebate, Britain has always been, after Germany, the largest net contributor to the E.U.’s budget, which is now spiralling towards $1 trillion.

Ever since the Iron Lady demanded and finally received her money back, knocking down European leaders like ninepins with her handbag, every subsequent British prime minister has been forced to defend it. Now Mr. Blair has sacrificed nearly half of Mrs. Thatcher’s rebate to pay for the enlargement of the E.U. – ten new countries have joined, mostly poor, with more to come – in return for a vague promise to reform the whole Byzantine system.

The prime minister told journalists last weekend that his concessions would cost the U.K. less than $2 billion a year, but the Treasury later undermined him by revealing that this figure was averaged over seven years, during which it would actually rise to almost twice as much. The Treasury’s boss, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, is Mr. Blair’s heir apparent and impatient to succeed him, so he is making the most of his rival’s bad press.

On Tuesday, Mr. Blair concluded six months of holding the rotating presidency of the European Union (“a fairly thankless task” was his understated description of this purgatory) to give a notably bad-tempered performance before members of the European Parliament in Brussels. He was told by one of his countrymen: “You will be remembered as the man who squandered Margaret Thatcher’s legacy,” while the other Europeans showed no gratitude at all: his concessions had merely whetted their appetites for more.

But it was the anti-European U.K. Independence Party, sporting Union Jacks, who finally got under the prime ministerial skin. Their leader, Nigel Farage, told Mr. Blair that he had lost “game, set and match to President Chirac.” “Why should our money go to new sewers in Budapest and a new underground in Warsaw when public services in London are crumbling?” he asked. (Americans who have recently experienced London bathrooms or subways may well agree.)

Mr. Blair rounded on him: “This is the year 2005, not 1945. We are not fighting each other any more,” he snapped. “You sit there with our country’s flag – but you do not represent our country’s interests.”

Unfortunately for the prime minister, public opinion both in Britain and on the Continent reckons that it is he who has failed to represent his country’s interests. The only significant achievement of the British presidency has been the opening of accession talks with Turkey and Croatia, but many Europeans are having second thoughts about admitting a nation of 70 million Muslims.

This has not been Mr. Blair’s only humiliation this week. Last Sunday, he woke up to find that the deputy prime minister, John Prescott, had given an interview in which he did his brutal best to sabotage Mr. Blair’s flagship reform of education. Not only did Mr. Prescott declare class war on the “Eton mafia” now running the Conservative Party – a coded attack on Mr. Blair, who was also privately educated – but he incited Labor malcontents to rebel. They don’t need much encouragement: about 80 have already declared their opposition to the blueprint for reform, which is modelled on the American charter schools. So, rather than be forced to rely on the Conservatives to get the measure through Parliament, Mr. Blair will have to dilute it.

The same thing has happened on terrorism. Ever since the London bombings last July, the Government has been retreating step by step. First, a parliamentary defeat on the Terrorism Bill forced Mr. Blair to drop a proposal to detain suspects for 90 days. Then Muslim lobbying compelled Mr. Blair to abandon proposed powers to close down mosques that propagate extreme Islamism and to penalize those who “glorify” terrorism.

This week it emerged that he has now had to renounce plans to test imams from the Middle East, many of whom belong to fundamentalist Muslim sects such as the Wahabbis of Saudi Arabia. The idea had been to make all foreign imams take a “Britishness” test within two years of arrival. This would have involved not only proficiency in the English language, but knowledge of British society and politics.

Asked why the plan had been dropped at yesterday’s regular monthly press conference, Mr. Blair replied that it had been decided to carry out checks on foreign imams before they came to Britain. That sounded fine, except that he added a crucial caveat: the authorities would ask “senior Muslim clerics” in Britain whether a given imam was a fundamentalist. This presumably means that if an imam is approved by these elders, he will be allowed in, and thereafter face no tests or restrictions at all.

It is not hard to see what is wrong with this. Some 85% of imams in Britain are themselves foreign-born, and many of them preach in mosques paid for by the Saudis or other foreign donors. It stretches credulity that an extremist imam from the same background will be vetoed by his peers. The government has delegated responsibility for policing British mosques to the very people who created the problem of extremism: the incumbent imams. The Muslim community either cannot or will not denounce terrorists and those who inspire them to the police.

Mr. Blair still bestrides the narrow world of British politics like a colossus. But it is worrying that he prefers to ignore the wishes of the electorate in order to placate special interests, whether European leaders, Leftist rebels or Muslim clerics. Yesterday, he looked like a man who badly needs to reconnect with the people who voted him back into Downing Street less than eight months ago.