“There is a tide in the affairs of men,” Brutus tells Cassius in Julius Caesar Act 4, Scene 3, “which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune … Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.”

I don’t know if Stephen Harper knows that passage; I doubt it. It might ring a distant bell with Tom Mulcair. Justin Trudeau probably knows it (he did teach drama, after all). Being politicians, of course, all three gentlemen know what it means: there are times where the tide of history can be turned by human hands — but only if you know how to spot the moment.

If that tide is turning now, neither Mulcair nor Trudeau will have to act with particular haste or decisiveness to exploit Harper’s weaknesses. The prime minister — with the help of his enthusiastic but inexperienced staffers — is doing the work for them.

This week could be the watershed. The Mike Duffy trial is winding up with even more revelations from the dark corners of the PMO. What we’ve learned from the trial already has been depressing enough: Harper’s PMO, staffed by bright young things with more nerve than knowledge, believes it exists not to assist the government but to be the government — and to hell with the executive and legislative branches.

Harper, like all good Reformers, was always ready to condemn Pierre Trudeau’s legacy of greatly expanding the size and power of the PMO. But not even the elder Trudeau could have imagined wielding the kind of control that Harper and his acolytes have achieved.

Comparisons in the media between Harper and Richard Nixon are getting to be old hat. There are some startling parallels. Both men were incapable of forgiving criticism from party ranks (trust me — I know). Neither man had the skill or the inclination to court the media. Both were very good at posing as right-of-centre politicians for the party faithful when, in fact, they were always pragmatic power-seekers.

And then there’s the coverup, of course. If, like Nixon, Harper is resorting to a selective recall of the facts, he’ll be held in public contempt — not because Mike Duffy accepted Nigel Wright’s $90,000 ‘good deed’, but because Harper refuses to take responsibility for the actions of his office. Watergate was once described as “a third-rate burglary” — but Nixon’s repeated denials turned what could have been a footnote into one of the most spectacular career meltdowns in U.S. political history. Harper is making the same mistake.

If Harper is to manage the Duffy fallout and have a shot at winning, he has to do the hardest thing in the world — he has to stop being himself. He must be, for the time being, the anti-Harper. If Harper is to manage the Duffy fallout and have a shot at winning, he has to do the hardest thing in the world — he has to stop being himself. He must be, for the time being, the anti-Harper.

His problem is that, while he doesn’t have a lot of close friends, Harper has even fewer good advisors. Which explains why he’s stonewalling on Ray Novak, his current chief of staff, who was drawn by Duffy trial testimony last week into the growing circle of people in the PM’s office who knew about the $90,000 cheque. Novak has been a Harper disciple for his entire adult life. During the Canadian Alliance leadership campaign, when Harper was jousting with Stockwell Day, I sat next to Novak in the Calgary campaign office as he tirelessly praised Harper’s greatness and muttered about his rivals.

But while Novak is personally close to Harper, he’s not the kind of guy to disagree with him — to give him the kind of advice he badly needs and seems to be missing lately. And as the courtroom testimony makes Novak even more of a liability, his political lifespan grows shorter. Novak is becoming increasingly expendable — and Harper will always jettison people at the first sign of trouble.

Harper’s ablest advisor was political science prof Tom Flanagan — also the man Harper most admired and trusted. If Harper had a close friend, Flanagan was probably the guy. But you won’t see Flanagan anywhere near this campaign because Harper sent him into political exile when his former Merlin misspoke. And Flanagan has a penchant for honesty. Harper hates criticism. End of story.

If Harper is to manage the Duffy fallout and have a shot at winning, he has to do the hardest thing in the world — he has to stop being himself. He must be, for the time being, the anti-Harper. He must admit that the strategy is falling apart and change it — shift the composition of his team, make the campaign less focused on him and more on the candidates and platform. He also needs to reach out to the national media and abandon the bunker mentality that limits reporters to a handful of questions per day. (Turns out that, if you give the press corps only five questions per day, they’re all going to be about Duffy.)

True, Harper has been able to sustain his core support throughout this ordeal. Some ebullient followers are even willing to cuss out the media for failing to appreciate what a non-story the Duffy affair really is. Such stalwart supporters are going to hang on regardless — but the party grassroots doesn’t always share their optimism, and they’re growing weary of obfuscation.

It’s hard to tell at first when an election campaign is collapsing. One early sign of slippage is sympathetic columnists suddenly rearing up to turn against you. Harper doesn’t have a lot of allies in the Parliamentary Press Gallery — but those who generally are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt have been asking pointed questions about his honesty lately.

Stephen Harper has all the advantages of incumbency; this is his campaign to lose. But he started the campaign with the peculiar decision to make it a marathon — with the Duffy trial nicely intersecting the race. Was that confidence? Or arrogance? Some called it insane; personally, I believe Harper and his posse truly thought no task was too great for them.

Maybe they don’t think so now. Harper might have been first out of the gate but — with a campaign hopelessly hobbled by a Trudeau fixation and a media strategy that treats journalists as unwelcome distractions — Harper now looks like the guy running out of gas. He needs to learn to take some good advice soon … or he risks being left in the dust.

David Krayden was raised on Vancouver Island and has written extensively on Western political issues over the years. He was a columnist for the Calgary Herald and host of Calgary’s Liberty Today radio program; more recently he worked as an editor for Sun News. Krayden was a public affairs officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force and spent almost a decade on Parliament Hill as a communications staffer.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.