I first sensed this change in mood from my perch in the Press Gallery high above the Commons chamber. You can see things there — smell them almost — which never make it on to TV. Watching politics on screen is like trying to watch Euro 2004 with your set tuned permanently to playercam. You get no sense of the game as a whole. You don’t see how the teams work. Twice this week and twice last, I watched Mr Blair walk on to a bumpy pitch with plenty of opportunities for his opponents to score goals. After all, his party had suffered its “worst ever” election drubbing before he had gone on to sign a constitution for Europe that the British public say they don’t want. And yet on all four occasions Labour’s captain strutted in front of the dispatch box to the cheers of his frontbench team and backbench supporters. Was it really only a month ago that he was forced to declare on a trip to Turkey that he would not “cut and run”? So, what has changed? Labour has reviewed its recent results and decided that they were not as bad as it had first thought. The divisions in the dressing room have stopped — for now. Most important of all, Mr Blair has rediscovered belief in himself. He has won a new UN resolution on Iraq, secured his “red lines” on Europe, seen off the federalist Guy Verhofstadt and published a five-year NHS plan without sparking a party row.

There is one other sign that Mr Blair is back from the brink. He is chatting to journalists again. This week I overheard one reporter boasting to another that he had just been to see the Prime Minister. “Oh really,” came the response, “so have I.” Both had emerged from these chats with a fresh conviction that “he is up for it”. Mr Blair continues to believe that the best advertisement for what he is doing is himself.

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