Smash hit

It is at the same time a shockingly confident and strangely desperate strategy. A frantic mix of effrontery and panic characterises Mr Blair’s whole career, as they must with any confidence trickster. He’s been found out and he knows it but he won’t confess and you won’t pin him down.

Making his entrance again with his usual flair/Sure of his lines . . . And maybe he’ll stumble — losing his timing this late/in his career. But he’ll pick himself up again.

Isn’t it rich? Isn’t it queer? Where are the clowns, then, for this election circus? Perhaps it is we who are the clowns, we Blairosceptics. Perhaps it is for us that the men in white coats will have to call next weekend, firmly removing the aerosol spray-guns from our hands as we daub the walls with obscenities about Alastair Campbell, and leading us kindly to a place of safety, as we mutter “But on October 17, 1999, Prime Minister, you most assuredly said . . .”

For what did we expect? That all at once Mr Blair was going to say to Jonathan Dimbleby on ITV “Ouch! You’ve got me there, Jono. Banged to rights, Guv. Guess I’d better put my hands up. I lied about Iraq. I lied about top-up fees. I lied about leaking David Kelly’s name. Come to think of it, I even lied six years ago when I promised everyone that they could see an NHS dentist ‘just by ringing NHS Direct’. Thought you lot wouldn’t notice. Thought you’d forgotten. I shall go straight from your studio to Buckingham Palace and tender my resignation to the Queen”?

Cheats don’t confess. They sweat, and stick to their story. Every bead on Mr Blair’s brow on Question Time on Thursday proclaimed it.

Forget Forward not Back; the Prime Minister’s real campaign slogan shouts from every white space between the printed words of his manifesto. That’s My Story And I’m Sticking To It. And in five days the electorate will solemnly place their pencilled cross beside a pair of mooning buttocks on the ballot paper. Ooh, you are awful, Tony, but we’ll vote for you.

You know what? Those of us with an allergic reaction to Mr B’s kind of politics are just going to have to lump it. We’ll never get him now. He’ll slither out of office soon, still claiming that he was right all along. We shall never quite prove him a fraud. The killer quote, the devastating witness, the smoking gun, will elude us.

Only after he has gone, in the steady, gentle downgrading by historians of Mr Blair’s preposterous claims on destiny, will his critics’ vindication lie. Only in the faint hiss of escaping wind as, in the slowest of leaks, his reputation deflates — will justice be done. One day we’ll wake up and the tyre will be flat: but there’ll never be a blowout.

We overlooked what democratic politics is all about: that bleak truth betrayed on a million doorsteps. “And what”, the voter asks the canvasser, “are you going to do for me?” The big Me in Britain 2005 says I am a little richer, a little securer, and my house worth a lot more, than ten years ago. The big Me says: “Sod Iraq; what has Blair done to hurt me?” So not yet for Blair the big E.

Kenneth Clarke put it best this week. The Government will run out of money, he said. We might as well save our breaths until then.

Times Recommends

• Fundamentalist brew: faith and power
• Big guns wheeled out for the marginals
• Wanted: new merchants of light