TONY BLAIR doesn’t much like reading interviews with politicians. He prefers, or at least he says he prefers, to hear the thoughts of football managers, the modern motivators of the common man. Jose Mourinho, for instance, has caught his eye and ear, no doubt for his dexterity at sophisicated mind games that have a relevance far beyond the boundaries of the football pitch.

Like Mourinho, Mr Blair must maintain a balance between confidence and complacency, but unlike Michael Howard, Mr Blair was unwilling to say what the score was at half time. Mr Howard famously reckoned that he was 2-0 down and had everyting to play for. So was the Labour Party one or two goals in front? Mr Blair refused to answer, and yet his manner and his words betrayed a sense of certainty about his future and about the future of Gordon Brown.

When discussing his neighbour, with whom he has what might be politely called a “complex relationship”, there was a hint of almost unscripted emotion, a slight quivering of the voice that suggested a rediscovered intimacy, a friendship reunited, if only for the duration of a campaign that the Prime Minister has promised will be his last.

Earlier in the day, Mr Brown had publicly defended the honour of the man whose job he has openly coveted and Mr Blair, in return, gave his strongest indication that, due process aside, Mr Brown would be the country’s next prime minister. He even acquiesced (or at least did not openly dimiss) to the suggestion that such a handover would take place about three years from now. The impression was duly conveyed that Mr Howard and his Sunday league strugglers might as well not return for the second half.

After being bombarded with accusations that he suppressed the Attorney General’s advice about the Iraq war, Mr Blair seemed to have regained composure in the reassuring surrounds of the family flat at Downing Street. After all the accusations of lying, which somehow seemed not to bother him yesterday, he was a little concerned that it was generally thought that he had gained a few pounds during the campaign. He insisted that his weight had remained constant, despite hard photographic evidence to the contrary. A fact? A fib? Or a lie?

He was frustrated rather than angry about the continued questioning over Iraq. His tone was “you can never satisfy the conspiracy theorists” as he sought to shift the battle to a choice of policies in the last few days of the campaign.

Mr Blair was at his most animated when talking about his third-term plans. He showered Mr Brown with compliments but declined to go the whole hog in naming him as his successor: “A week from a general election, I have a natural reluctance to end up with great headlines about who will be the next prime minister when the country has not even decided it wants me to remain Prime Minister.

“But I have said on many occasions said that Gordon will make an excellent prime minister. I am not going to say any more. But the two of us have worked extremely closely together in this campaign in a fantastic way.” If he has said so on many occasions, many of us have missed it.

Mr Blair did not accept the Lennon and McCartney metaphor — they are his great heroes — but it is “a relationship that has achieved a huge amount”.

He said: “It has been the foundation of the Government. I think that, if I am frank that, when we both saw the sheer ghastliness of the Tory campaign it made us realise what is important and what is not important.

“I think you will have noticed that on the launch of the manifesto there was a very strong coming together, not just on the economic agenda but the public sevices agenda,” he noted with emphasis, confirming the point later.

He said Mr Brown had been as impressed as him with “empirical evidence that suggests that public sector reform is working and that makes the case for reform. Gordon is the person who led the way on things like public-private partnerships and the private finance initiative.”

He never doubted for a moment that when the time came Mr Brown would be right at the centre of the campaign.

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