IS THERE no limit to the credulity of the British media? Tony Blair tells us how he sees the next stage in his political career; and here we all are, scribbling away excitedly as though this were now the likelihood.

Holy cow, what else is the guy going to say? This is a man whose eternally triangular relationship with the twin sisters Truth and Belief is by now surely a matter of public record; the man who only this week told us “I only know what I believe”, and whose beliefs are as the clouds scudding across our autumn sky: forming and re-forming into fantastical shapes – dragons, cows, electoral reform; Saddam and Osama arm-in-arm; the rescue of Africa.

This is the man who believes that the war against terrorism is a simple question of Good versus Evil, and that George W. Bush will force Ariel Sharon to the negotiating table; a man who believed that there would be a referendum on the single currency in his second term and now believes that there will be a referendum on the European constitution in his third.

This is a man who believes all kinds of things: believes them before breakfast and unbelieves them by lunch.

So what on earth makes anyone suppose that, just because in some sleepless hour before dawn Mr Blair has concluded that he must urgently declare a set of long-term intentions, the world has been given any clearer picture now than we had last Saturday of what is likely to happen when we and he are all half a decade older? Listen, guys. Just because Tony Blair says he will do something, doesn’t mean he will. Just because he believes something now, doesn’t mean he will next year.

Columnists should not bore their readers by reminding them of yellowing columns we once wrote and I try not to make a habit of it; but indulge me just this once. It must be six months or more since, on this page, I wrote that as the general election approached Mr Blair would prove incapable of maintaining his silence on how long he planned to continue after he had won it. I predicted that the Tories would think up a slogan like “Vote Blair, get Brown” and that it would resonate; and that eventually Mr Blair would be discomfited into making some kind of a statement about his intentions.

I added that at first he might obfuscate, but that careful obfuscation would only arouse suspicion; and people would think it constitutionally offensive for him to run for a full term if he would not undertake to serve a full term.

I said that in the end (and before election day) Mr Blair would have to promise to serve a full term, whether or not he was sure about doing so, just to kill speculation.

And so it has happened. Mr Blair tried the obfuscations: he came up with a clutch of verbal formulae all calculated to give the impression that he was “up for” a full term, without quite saying he would serve it. He tried protesting that you don’t enter a general election without being “prepared” to serve a full term. But he found that such foxiness fooled nobody. The press and the Tories smelt his unease.

That unease has grown. My mistake was to predict that Mr Blair would be forced off the fence during the election campaign itself. In fact it has happened sooner.

The final stage of my reasoning was this: I guessed that the reason that the Prime Minister was so reluctant to get off the fence was that Gordon Brown was reassured by his neighbour’s reluctance to promise to stay; and that once Mr Blair was forced into doing so, Mr Brown’s wrath would be terrible.

We shall see. I suspect that Mr Blair has slipped off the fence so early because his relationship with Mr Brown has gone beyond repair faster than we expected. Mr Blair has nothing left to lose in that quarter now, and is gambling on Mr Brown storming around for a few weeks, then bottling out.

Again, we shall see. But do let’s stop reporting that Mr Blair has now “revealed” that he “will” serve a full third term. The verb “revealed” and the simple future tense are for use in the realm of facts. The realm in which we are dealing here is the realm of hopes.

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