Gaddafi, Karzai, Wenger: it’s time to face the truth

There is a tide in the affairs of men – and women – when it becomes plain to all except the individual concerned that they have reached the tipping point in their public lives.

Losing the plot, not getting a grip, drifting out of touch, sailing away with the fairies, losing the dressing room – call it what you will, but it is has been happening a lot to the powerful and great of late.

Take the delusional decline of Muammar Gaddafi, the steady drift of Hamid Karzai, and the dramatic collapse in reputation of one of English football's most charismatic managers, Arsene Wenger of Arsenal. All of a sudden they look past it, candidates for history's early retirement home.

Wenger, 62 this October, was once regarded as the Dumbledore of football, conjuring magical teams out of a motley crew of callow youth scarcely old enough to shave. Now, with two of his greatest players - Fabregas and Nasri – disillusioned and departed, he has recorded the biggest defeat his club has endured in over a hundred years, 8-2 away to Manchester United.

Yes, he has dipped into Arsenal's coffers and bought five new players, but the result is a team that looks much less than the sum of its parts.

The tipping point of the Wenger story is that he didn't realise when he was losing the support of his players, and then the Arsenal fans.

The same might be said of Muammar Gaddafi, who until January this year looked like the great survivor of the Arab and African dictators' club. As the revolt in Libya gathered steam, he just didn't seem to know what he was up against and has failed entirely to ensure an escape route – if he is alive at all, that is.

With Karzai, it is a different story. He knew from 2002 he didn't have the full support of the west, as Britain and America told him then they were about to focus on Iraq rather than Afghanistan.

A diplomat who broke the news to the Afghan president personally has told me of Karzai's sheer horror that Afghanistan was to be abandoned yet again by Britain, and at such short notice. Since then, for Karzai and his clan it has all been about survival. Only lately does he seem to have realised that his political career has run out of road.

Some know when to quit. Hillary Clinton, who looks increasingly worn out by her travels, has declared her intention to leave office next year. Would that Donald Rumsfeld, the youngest and oldest defence secretary in US history, and vice president Dick Cheney had enjoyed similar self-knowledge. Clearly too old for the job in the Bush regime, their dottiness and delusion led us all into some very dangerous places.

It is not so much a question of age, more one of mental exhaustion. After nearly 12 years at the helm Margaret Thatcher was shoved out of office by her party at the age of 65. This was just a year younger than the age at which Churchill first became prime minister in 1940 at 66. He last returned to Downing Street in 1951 at the age of 77 – and nearly beat Gladstone's record of retiring as prime minister at the age of 85.

He wasn't the first old-timer to keep on trucking. St Augustine preached and taught until the age of 76, though in great pain. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry II's ballsy wife, died at 82, only two years after she led an army against her stroppy younger son King John. She was immortalised in The Lion in Winter by the wondrous Katharine Hepburn, already in her 60s.

Talking of whom, just look at our three great dames of stage and screen, Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. All in their 70s, they seem to be going through not so much an Indian summer, but an Indian spring.

Or take two of our greatest historians – Michael Howard, 88, and Eric Hobsbawm, 94. They are pacing themselves admirably, rarely uttering in public now. But when they do it is worth more than the output of the rest of the media commentariat put together.

It's really the old game of how to talk truth to power – and celebrity. It is no longer a question of the slave telling the emperor in his triumph, "Caesar, you too are mortal". The challenge today is for confidante – or slave - to get the clear message through: "Boss, you too are completely knackered". ·