Through an orthodox lens Shinzo Abe looked an eminently suitable candidate to succeed Junichiro Koizumi as Japan's prime minister one year ago. Rarely has a political judgment proved so wrong following his surprise resignation yesterday.
As cabinet secretary Mr Abe knew the workings of government intimately and as the grandson of a famous post-war prime minister and the son of a foreign minister he had politics in his bones. Ideologically he combined a populist desire to oversee the emergence of a strong, unapologetic and "beautiful" Japan with a determination to strengthen the country's alliance with the United States. Those who said that he had insufficient experience of the Liberal Democrat Party's bruising factional system to exercise power were won over by his comparative youthfulness at 52 and impressed by his confident neoconservative programme.
Mr Abe started well on his chosen ground of foreign policy when he visited China and began to unfreeze hostility to Mr Koizumi's provocative visits to the Yasukuni shrine, which honours war criminals among other nationalist heroes. This seemed to presage a better bilateral relationship. Likewise, he pleased President Bush by moving rapidly to enable Japan take up a naval role supplying the US war effort in Afghanistan from the Indian Ocean, thereby fulfilling his pledge to boost the military's morale and end its post-war constitutional limitations.
At home his record was altogether different. It moved from initially bad appointments of incompetent and weak ministers to worse scandals involving corruption in which four of them resigned. Finally came a spectacularly misjudged and casual response to popular fears about the loss of entitlements when 50 million pension records were lost by the public bureaucracy. As a result the LDP had its worst result since it was founded in 1955 when it lost control of the upper house in July's elections.
Mr Abe seemed to have decided to fight on when he appointed a new cabinet two weeks ago and insisted he would confront opposition leader Ichiro Ozawa in the upper house over the naval operations. His sudden resignation has been widely criticised for its ill-judged timing. This bolsters Mr Ozawa's efforts to forge a new centre-left grouping capable of winning a general election, which will probably be brought forward from 2009. Mr Abe may have unwittingly prepared the way for restructuring Japan's retarded political system and rethinking the tensions and contradictions between his party's neonationalism and its continuing strategic dependence on the US.