TONY BLAIR did not stay up to hear which way Ohio had finally voted, in the most passionately contested US election for decades, which has dominated news for months and brought the world’s diplomacy to a halt.

“You won’t believe it but it’s true,” said Mr Blair, revealing that he went to bed at 10.30pm on Tuesday, well before the polls closed. As he went to sleep, he thought, from exit polls, that John Kerry had won. But he got up at 5.30am to find that George W. Bush was almost certainly back in the White House.

The Prime Minister gave his first interview since the US election result to The Times yesterday morning. We talked to him in his study in 10 Downing Street for an hour between the end of the weekly Cabinet meeting and his departure for a European summit in Brussels. He declined to say whether he was pleased with the election result. “I always made clear throughout that I would remain neutral and that is the way it is going to stay,” he said.

“I have read that one group of people said I was privately hoping for a Kerry victory, and from another lot of people that I was privately hoping for a Bush victory. Nobody knows. I have not discussed it.”

There had been many exaggerations, he said, about what difference a Kerry victory would have made to foreign policy. “We would still have been sitting there working through Iraq, the Middle East peace process, all those issues would have remained.” He said that he was not particularly surprised at the result, but admitted being surprised at the exit polls, favouring Kerry, he was given the night before. “But I am never very good at predicting these things.”

For himself, Mr Blair sees a chance now to renew what he calls an immensely strong relationship with President Bush, although he acknowledges that “on a party-to-party basis”, Labour is much closer to the Democrats than to Republicans. ”

When will he see Mr Bush? “I can’t answer”, he said, but “there is constant contact, and we do these video conferences, which work well, where we go through the whole agenda.”

The Prime Minister said he spoke to Mr Bush on Saturday. “There was a real sense that in the second term the President has space and energy to develop an agenda that I hope can unify Europe and America. That means reaching out on both sides.”

But did Mr Bush actually say he wanted to heal the rift with Europe? “I think he does want to do it, yes. He will say it in his own way and in his own time.” If Europe plays its part, that is. Mr Blair delivered a passionate impromptu lecture — to European leaders, his own party and the British media — that they should come to terms with Tuesday’s result.

“President Bush is there for four years. In a way some people are in a sort of state of denial,” he said. “The election has happened, America has spoken, the rest of the world should listen.” He did, however, add: “It is important that America listens to the rest of the world too.”

He described as quite unbelievable some of the coverage: “The suggestion almost that how can America go and vote for President Bush?” Instead, “It is a good idea to listen to what they are saying and to try and analyse and understand it.”

The American view of the threat that the US faced after September 11 is “not some instinctive trigger-happy reaction, it is a reflective and considered view”, Mr Blair said. “Now, they may be right or wrong. I happen to think it is right, but it is a view that is worthy of serious debate, rather than condemning people who take that view as either liars, warmongers or idiots. I hope one thing that happens in the aftermath of the election is that we start to get a sensible debate about why people in America feel as they do.”

He rejects the view, held by some in his party, that Mr Bush “owes him” for his support. “The attitude is that we do not really believe in this War on Terror, so we should get recompense for going along with it. But I do not feel we have been acting out of blind loyalty or out of compulsion as an ally.”

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