Somebody should film a Monty Python's Life of Tony. This Prime Minister's approach to big challenges puts me in mind of Jesus of Nazareth's. You will remember the apparent pickle in which the latter found himself after he had gone (as St Luke explains) "privately into a desert place" and found to his disciples' horror that a trusting multitude of five thousand had followed him. And there was nothing to eat.

As the party had with them only five loaves and two fishes, Jesus's panicking lieutenants suggested they admit the scale of the problem and send the crowd away; but their master held up a hand and said "Give ye them to eat". Luke does not actually describe the Disciples' jaws dropping, but we can picture it.

I picture their master, too, as the adoring five thousand sit on the dry earth and wait for something to happen. "Cripes," he is thinking, "how did I get myself into this? Losing my timing this late in my career. Where are the clowns? There ought to be clowns.

"You'll get by, you always have before. Something will turn up."

Blair casts himself as EU president candidate

Speaking on French TV, Tony Blair sang the praises of the EU and sketched his agenda for its future, all in fluent French

Multimedia

• The Blair years: video, pictures and analysis

• Interactive Blair Timeline

• BlairTube

Background

• The past decade a disaster?

• All about Iraq? Don’t you believe it

• I’ll give Blair six and a half out of ten

Multimedia

• Blair fashion gallery

• Cherie Blair picture gallery

• Brookes on Blair

And, Luke reports, something did. For those (including, we presume, the Prime Minister) who accept the account of the miracle which followed, the conclusion must be that faith provides a momentum all its own. Believe, and the five thousand will be fed. Throw yourself at the Red Sea, and at the last moment it will part. Trust, and the Lord will provide.

The Lord has not done too badly by Tony Blair so far. The Red Sea parted in April 1982, offering the youthful careerist the national limelight of a by-election to fight in the unwinnable seat of Beaconsfield. Not many months later he was able to cut a figure in Sedgefield when, by a margin of one vote out of more than 80, the Red Sea divided again and he snuk (behind a fast-footed party organiser who had taken to the young man) into a lacklustre shortlist.

Nobody denies he then acquitted himself well as an MP, but he was lucky to be noticed so soon by John Smith and put on the front bench; lucky to make it fast from a minor to a good job in the Shadow Cabinet when the Shadow Employment Secretary, Michael Meacher, fell foul of Neil Kinnock; lucky that when he moved up to the position of Shadow Home Secretary, his opposite number -Michael Howard -was becoming a national hate-figure; and lucky to appropriate for his own use Gordon Brown's slogan "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" weeks before the James Bulger murder.

The next parting of the waters was stupendous. John Smith died of a massive heart attack at exactly the wrong moment for Gordon Brown. So it was Tony Blair who took the crown at exactly the right moment for any new Opposition leader - just as his party was coming within clear sight of victory.

That as the Tories fell they handed the new Prime Minister an unfolding economic recovery, that the Opposition then proceeded to fall apart, that his first big war saw the sudden and unpredicted collapse of the Serb foe, and that the global slump which forever threatens to unpick his promises keeps being averted at the last moment, may not be entirely unconnected with Tony Blair's own good judgment, but if the beat of a closely-hovering guardian angel's wings is not audible to you, it is to me.

And I suspect it is to him. Were I Mr Blair I would in the still of the night have asked myself whether there might be a Plan. A couple of months ago our Prime Minister chose for his reading at a memorial service in a New York cathedral a long excerpt about love, death and God's purpose from a novel by an American Christian humanist writer, Thornton Wilder. The core of this short book is the search for a Divine Intention behind the apparent cruel chaos of earthly life.

"Some say," concludes Wilder, "that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God."

A fair few feathers have been brushed away to smooth Tony Blair's path this past quarter century. No wonder he is confident. No wonder he secretly hopes that if only he marches Britain towards the breaking waves with sufficient faith and at sufficient pace, they will part again. They always have before.

Times Recommends

• Blair: My Years*
• Are we being too mean on the Blairs?
• Tony’s career in property