I HAD A DREAM. It was the morning after the general election. I was late for a television interview. Running for a train I fumbled for an explanation for what had just happened.

Tony Blair had lost. A Labour Government had been defeated. By whom, the dream did not say. There was nothing in it about a Conservative victory: even in dreams there are limits to the imaginable.

I have a vague recollection of fretting that we knew who had lost without really knowing who had won. My immediate problem, however, was with Labour’s defeat: how could this be reconciled with all the polling evidence we had confidently cited as proof that Mr Blair was heading for a comfortable victory?

As in my dream I ran through the ticket barriers at White City Tube station, the explanation hit me. The polls had been bogus — all of them. It was part of a fiendish Blairite plot to cheat fate by saturating the media with propaganda suggesting that his victory was certain. Yet he had been losing all along.

This explained everything: those ghastly television performances; the palpable implausibility of his every answer; his obvious slipperiness; the boos of audiences; the reaction one felt to every new Blairite confection or evasion: “Are my countrymen mad? Nobody I know believes this stuff. How can people support him?” Now we knew they never had. Those “how will you vote?” polls had been invented. In my dream everything fell into place and the world looked sane again.

But (said the dream) the faking of opinion polls had been a brilliant ruse: win-win for Blair. His first line of attack — plan A — had been to create an impression of unstoppable momentum, so people would vote for him just because he looked like a winner. If that failed, it would buy time for Plan B: Divine Rescue. A bird-flu pandemic, or something, would turn up.

If nothing did and he lost, Plan C was to claim, on the basis of all those pre-election polls, that it was the general election result that was wrong. He would say the counting had been “flawed”, ignore it, and carry on. This (my dream said) was what he would now do.

After that I woke up. The dream had been nonsensical. But the riddle it posed had been what has tormented me through waking hours too. How is it that there should be a near-universal rejection of Tony Blair — ranging from cynical disbelief to apoplectic detestation — while all the polls say he is cruising to comfortable victory? Nobody believes a word he says, yet pollsters report that the nation is about to re-elect him. The dream pointed to two apparently contradictory truths.

I can reconcile them differently from the dream. To do so we must face a third truth, and it is bleak indeed. Yes, the British people do know that Tony Blair is a cheat. Yes, the British people do intend to re-elect him. And no — you’re right; your logic has leapt ahead of me — the British people do not mind being led by a cheat.

Some of us have been missing the point. Here we’ve been, we columnists on the Right and Left, jumping up and down, frenziedly impatient to prove that Mr Blair really does twist the truth. But prove to whom? The public? They never doubted it. They reached that conclusion years ago. Reached it, and decided to live with it.

There they’ve been, those Dimblebys, Paxmans and Humphryses, furiously firing quotations at Mr Blair — on November 7, 2003, speaking on Newsnight, you said this Prime Minister, and I quote “. . .”, while on April 3, 2004, this was what you told the House of Commons “. . .” — each of them in the hope of finally skewering Mr Blair.

And there they’ve been — those Howards and Kennedys, Ancrams and Salmonds, Cooks and Menzies Campbells — peppering us with erudite columns, indignant press releases and open letters to 10 Downing Street, demanding to know how Mr Blair reconciles (a) with (b) given what he said about (c) when answering a question from the Rt Hon X on the subject of Y in 199Z. And what do we get by way of response? Two cheeks of Mr Blair’s bottom pressed impertinently to the inside rear window of his departing bus.

Mr Blair does not answer inquisitors: he moons them. The key phrases are unspoken but they underlie every answer: “So what?”, “See if I care?” and “sucks to you”. As the football chant might have it, “I’m here because I’m here because I’m here”, followed by “what are you gonna do about it, pipsqueak?”

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