editorial comment A true politician. I'll tell you how to lead your private lives; stay clear of mine......

An affair of the heart is, often enough in British politics, the end of the line for the politician involved.

Not yet, it seems, for David Blunkett, Britain's home secretary, the country's leading law-and-order official who is battling to clear his name. Mr. Blunkett, 57 and divorced, is seeking to counter newspaper reports that, in conducting a now ended clandestine relationship with Kimberly Fortier, 43, the married publisher of the conservative weekly The Spectator, he misused his office.

Mr. Blunkett, an official with working-class roots and a reputation as a onetime radical leftist, is accused of ordering officials in his department to speed approval of a visa for his ex-mistress's nanny, Leoncia Casalme.

In the eyes of Tony Blair, Britain's prime minister and a close friend of Mr. Blunkett, the brouhaha does not amount to a cause for resignation. When asked at a news conference on Monday whether there had been any talk of Mr. Blunkett's quitting, Mr. Blair said, "No is the answer to that."

But since then, Mr. Blunkett's position seems to have gotten messier.

Late Tuesday night, The Daily Mail tabloid, in its early Wednesday editions, showed what it said were official letters proving that Ms. Casalme had secured her visa 19 days after being told by Mr. Blunkett's department not to get her hopes up.

Mr. Blunkett ordered an independent inquiry into the allegations about the visa, bolstered by assurances from Mr. Blair on Monday.

"I should say to you that I have every confidence in him," Mr. Blair said at the news conference. "He has been, is, will continue to be, a first-class home secretary."

"Politicians are entitled to private lives, the same as anyone else," he said, expressing a view shared publicly by other government ministers but not by newspapers, which have feasted on reports - denied by Mr. Blunkett - that he is claiming paternity of Ms. Fortier's 2-year-old son and a baby expected next year.

Her husband, Stephen Quinn, was quoted on Tuesday as saying she had been hospitalized, suffering from stress after collapsing at home.

Newspapers have also reported that Mr. Blunkett had committed other transgressions, including giving a first-class rail voucher that is supposed to be used only by members of Parliament to Ms. Fortier, who has reverted to using her married name, Kimberly Quinn. On Tuesday, Mr. Blunkett said through a spokesman that he had made a "genuine mistake" about the ticket and had repaid the $350 it cost to parliamentary authorities.

Other perks of his office supposedly diverted to her include a government chauffeur to drive her to Mr. Blunkett's home and the deployment of a police officer outside her home during an antiglobalization protest.

The conservative Sunday Telegraph, whose owners also own The Spectator, accused Mr. Blunkett of divulging confidential security information to his mistress and her family. Mr. Blunkett's aides denied the charge.

The Conservatives have stayed relatively mute, possibly inhibited by the fact that in November one of their own high-fliers, Boris Johnson, was demoted from his position as the opposition culture spokesman to a simple legislator after first denying reports of an illicit relationship as "an inverted pyramid of piffle."

It was widely noted among London's media watchers that Mr. Johnson's relationship had been with Petronella Wyatt, a columnist on The Spectator, of which Mr. Johnson is editor and Mrs. Quinn the publisher.

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