OTTAWA—Even for a political loner such as Stephen Harper, life at the top is becoming dangerously lonely.

Some of that isolation has been on evidence this week as Harper loyalists were hastily conscripted to step into the fray of the Senate spending crisis.

The most visible has been Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird. In Harper’s absence, he has been tasked with holding the fort in the House of Commons.

A heavy travel schedule would not usually make a foreign affairs minister a natural choice for the unforgiving mission of keeping a blood-thirsty opposition at bay in the House.

But Baird is a strong parliamentary performer and, more importantly, the prime minister’s most trusted minister.

Late Friday, former Harper aides were also drafted to spread the prime minister’s message that he was (suddenly) mad as hell over the Senate scandal.

Those calls were the clearest signal to date that Conservative strategists were circling the wagons around the prime minister. They offered a solid hint that the chief of staff who should have been coordinating the counter-offensive was on the way out.

Less than 48 hours later, Nigel Wright was gone.

Harper and his extended palace guard may eventually shift into an effective crisis management mode but, for now, they mostly look like they are hitting a broken panic button.

Like an orchestra wading its way through an unfamiliar partition in the absence of a conductor, the Conservatives are scrambling to strike the right note. Attaining perfect pitch could take a while.

Much has been said about the extraordinary circumstances that led to Wright’s resignation but not enough about the dire consequences of the abrupt end of his working relationship with the prime minister.

They stand to linger long after the dust has settled on the raging Senate spending scandal.

It is not unheard of for someone in Wright’s position to fall on his sword but his departure belongs in the worst-case scenario category — with no transition in place and at a crucial time in the life of the government.

It is hard to overstate the role of the chief of staff in the running of Canada’s modern governments.

In an increasingly centralized governing environment, no minister comes to the shoulder of the chief PMO operative on the scale of influence.

On top of making the trains run on time and extinguishing fires such the Senate blaze that ultimately became his funeral pyre, Wright served as Harper’s fixer on files as sensitive as the Keystone pipeline and the Canada-EU free trade negotiation.

To compound Harper’s predicament, his resignation comes on the eve of mid-mandate reset of the government’s agenda and at a point when public opinion has been souring on the Conservatives.

An early summer cabinet shuffle is expected to be the opening act of the upcoming recast. Some of the pre-shuffle speculation has centered around finance minister Jim Flaherty.

Given his strong business connections, Wright was a confidence-inspiring beacon to corporate Canada. With him gone, the call Harper must make as to Flaherty’s ongoing role has become even more delicate.

Wright’s hastily appointed successor is the last remaining PMO staffer to have crossed the desert from opposition to government at the prime minister’s side.

At 36, Ray Novak has spent his professional life around Harper and, for the most part, on Parliament Hill. For all his talents he brings a less worldly perspective to his role than his predecessors.

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Recruiting an outsider to his inner circle who would then have needed months to get the lay of Harperland was unpalatable to the prime minister.

Novak obviously shares an enviable comfort zone with Harper. But his appointment comes at a time when what the prime minister may need most is to step out of that zone and reach out to more Canadians.

The risk is that the elevation of an insider such as Novak to the top rank of executor of the prime minister’s wishes will only compound Harper’s self-enforced isolation.

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