Rather, it was a lifeline: from a drowning man to those he hopes will rescue him.

Watching his poll numbers drop, faced with the threat of mass defections from his Tory- Democratic Representative coalition, and feeling his leverage dwindling by the day, Mr.

Clark has taken the only route left to him: make a bold-sounding proposal for talks on merging the Progressive Conservatives and the Canadian Alliance, including the headline-grabbing offer to co-operate in fielding "a single conservative candidate" in every riding in the next election, and hope Stephen Harper takes him up on it.

It is now clear how much of the "impasse" between the Tories and the Alliance was simply a matter of Alliance weakness, which is to say of Stockwell Day's erratic leadership. Mr. Clark, once the object of widespread ridicule, had been basking in the reflected glow of Mr. Day's incompetence. But notwithstanding the advantage conferred by Mr. Day, the Tories never rose in the polls: the Alliance simply fell. So it was that many despairing Alliance members came to view a merger, or some such co-operative arrangement between the two parties, as the only way to break the logjam -- a position Mr. Harper himself rejected.

Bingo. Mr. Harper has hardly been Alliance leader for more than a couple of weeks, and already the logs have begun to move. First, early polls and favourable media reaction provided evidence of what a formidable candidate he is likely to be. Second, the seven wandering Alliance members in the Democratic Representative Caucus, until now content to be Mr. Clark's junior partners, suddenly began to get antsy. Under pressure from their riding associations to return to the Alliance, and sensing that the train was leaving the station, they served notice on Mr. Clark that they might just leave with it.

The strategy appears to have worked. Until now, Chuck Strahl has looked so deferential standing next to Mr. Clark at press conferences and the like that one might almost have mistaken him for the Tory leader's butler. Last night, he was staring at him with a look that appeared suspiciously like triumph.

The DRC leader's own position was fast crumbling beneath him, caught as he was between the Alliance and the Tories. The threat to return to the Alliance was his own version of a Hail Mary pass, for there is no guarantee what kind of reception the DRC members would have been given, or what role, if any, they would have been assigned.

Mr. Harper had held the door open for them. But he had promised them nothing.

On the other hand, Mr. Clark has apparently promised them everything. It is a spectacular backflip, executed in the space of little more than five hours. Going into the meeting, Mr.

Clark was categoric. There would be no revision of Tory policy, guaranteed in its constitution no less, that it would field a candidate in every one of the country's 301 ridings in the next election: the so-called 301 rule. This was an explicit rejection of Mr.

Strahl's published pleas that now was the time, with Mr. Day out of the way, to move toward joint nomination of candidates, or at the least a non-aggression pact in those ridings currently held by either party.

By the time he came out of the meeting, Mr. Clark's position had altered by, oh, about 180 degrees. It was time, he said, to end the vote-splitting on the right that had allowed the Liberals "to win by default." He proposed a meeting between himself and the Alliance leader, to be proceeded, in true summit meeting style, by preliminary negotiations between lower-level officials. And he made clear that his previous unalterable opposition to fielding a single candidate had in fact been altered.

It's still not clear how genuine his conversion is. He may still be hoping merely to put Mr.

Harper on the spot, hoping that the Alliance leader, by rejecting his offer, can be made to look intransigent. But the facts are that Mr. Harper's star is rising, and Mr. Clark's is falling. Were the DRC to bolt, Mr. Clark's leadership would be seriously in question.

That he did not choose to call their bluff suggests he is in no position to bluff with Mr.

Harper.

In which case, it's not clear why Mr. Harper would accept, so soon after winning the leadership on the contrary proposition and just hours after his own minions had signalled that the chances of a merger were zero, gusting to negligible. Sure, the two might negotiate some sort of rickety arrangement between the two parties, notwithstanding their vast policy differences and mutual loathing. But what's in it for the Alliance? The only place where vote-splitting matters, even in theory, is Ontario. And if, under Mr. Harper, the Alliance has renewed hope of simply rolling over the Tories -- they now have eight times the membership, and nearly five times as many MPs -- why stop to catch Mr.

Clark's lifeline?