MOBILE phone texts are a convenient way for people to arrange a drink down the pub. They are not, as Downing Street discovered yesterday, such a great medium for the Prime Minister to deliver a revealing interview.

Wide-ranging answers on his marriage, his private passion for Lynyrd Skynyrd, and which Cabinet member he does the best impression of, were received on the public’s mobile phones as garbled texts from “pm” such as “the security services r doing a great job”.

The first, seemingly insurmountable, problem for the organisers of the “first WAP and text conversation with Britain’s leader” was that Tony Blair does not know how to text. Shortly after he confessed that even intensive, last-minute coaching from 16-year-old daughter Kathryn had failed. “Let’s say my texting talents are underdeveloped,” said Mr Blair, 51. Instead the famously technophobe Prime Minister was furnished with a team of five young people who would translate his answers into textspeak, much like interpreters at the United Nations.

Mr Blair sailed through a couple of the 7,000 questions that had been texted to him by O2 network users, visibly relaxing as he said he had been “told to keep the answers short” for the purpose of fitting them on a mobile phone screen. But from then he adopted an expansive, confessional tone utterly unsuitable to the task.

After his nuanced musings had been compressed into three-word grunts it appeared to those following on their phones as if an illiterate teen had been left in charge of running the country.

The most dominant theme of the questions were Iraq, which left him unfazed, as did inquiries into the power balance in his marriage. He admitted that his wife Cherie had ordered him to give up smoking before she would marry him. “I had my last cigarette a quarter of an hour before we got married.”

Asked for his favourite guitar solo, opted for The Beatles’ While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Skynyrd’s Freebird.

Then came the most sensitive matter of all. A woman called Dorothy had heard that Mr Blair did a mean impression of John Prescott. Was it true?

“No,” he said. The moderator asked if he was sure. “Not a brilliant impression,” he said. “Not in John’s company, anyway.”

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