Another Tony Blair has emerged this week. He looked ten years older, exhausted, red-eyed and strained - all of which can be put down to the ludicrous way of doing business at the European summit in Nice and Baby Leo's teething. But this Tony Blair, appearing for an hour on ITV's Ask the Prime Minister, was also truly feeling our pain. Yes, the trains are in a mess. No, policemen are not paid enough. Yes, waiting-lists are still too long, he told his interrogators in the studio audience. But things are getting better - just give me time, time, time. That was the message, in an almost ingratiating display of prime ministerial humility. How different from the Tony Blair we see socking it to William Hague in the House of Commons, or the raging tyrant about whom we read in so much of the press, who is driving the country into a European superstate.
For some months now, Labour strategists have been struggling with the question of how to turn round the unhelpful image that Blair has acquired - of being arrogant, metropolitan, swanky and out of touch. They've looked across the Atlantic and rather envied President Clinton's "State of the Union" chats. Blair couldn't emulate them here with-out the broadcasters having to offer an equal opportunity to William Hague and Charles Kennedy. In any case, if the record of party political broadcasts is anything to go by, all it would do is vastly increase the number of cups of tea and ham sandwiches consumed of an evening, while viewers waited for normal programmes to be resumed.
Tony Blair did try an internet version of the "fireside chat", but it was soon abandoned due to lack of interest. The truth is that Blair is no Bill Clinton - for which Cherie must thank the Lord - which means that, however hard he tries, he's not going to connect with the public in the way Clinton does. Blair lacks Clinton's natural ease and confidence - the flip- side being that he is a far more decent, pleasing personality in private than he has appeared up till now on television.
He claimed, as he grappled with the nation's concerns, to be enjoying himself. It's the one chance I have to speak to the people without having to go through the press, he said. And that is the key to it all, the reason we can expect a lot more of the Prime Minister "in person" as the election approaches: Tony Blair has finally given up on the press.
The Nice summit may not have marked the hoped-for - and, in some cases, feared - transformation in the Continent's politics. But it did mark a change in the relationship between the anti-EU media, led by the Sun, and the pro-EU Blair. Long before Nice, Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's press secretary, was steadily increasing his attacks on the press. During the summit, it was apparently even more dramatic stuff.
But this is a complicated tale. However much we at the New Statesman would like Blair to sever relations with the Murdoch press, it is not going to happen. The Sun and the government are like two mutually attracted but incompatible lovers. They can't ignore each other and they can't quite like each other, either. In a triumphalist editorial this week, the Sun claimed that "Blair owes us". Come again? It argued that, by attacking him and Robin Cook over their pro-European instincts, the paper was keeping him away from politically lethal decisions.
"The truth is that, but for the strongly held views of the Sun and other newspapers, Mr Blair may have given even more away in Nice . . . Thanks to our readers, we did not scrap the Pound as Mr Blair wished three years ago." Had that happened, "Tony Blair, now riding high in the polls, would be in deep, deep trouble. Don't mention it, Prime Minister."
OK, ignore the smug tone and ignore the fact that when the Sun writes "our readers" it really means "our proprietor". There is more than a grain of truth in all this.
There is no doubt that together, at a time when parliamentary opposition has been weak, the press generally have stopped Blair going nearly as far in a Europhile direction as he would have liked. This is more than influence: it is power. Few oppositions could expect to do what they have done, which is to keep a Prime Minister with a historic majority and a huge poll lead more or less where they want him when it comes to the biggest issue facing the country.
Everywhere, we can see the signs of Blair chafing at this humiliation. This explains Campbell's attacks. It explains the Prime Minister's enthusiasm for bypassing the papers and going direct to television viewers. It explains the real worry inside the government - expressed in my interview with Charles Clarke (see page 18) - about the growing influence of the anti-Euro press on the broadcasters.
Certainly, Tony Blair has decided that he cannot "win the press" and is trying to hector and circumvent the papers, instead. At some point every PM tries it. But the more important thing is that, beyond the rough waters of the European argument, there are even stormier seas that the press have hidden from him.
For if he had really listened - as well as performed - in his ITV hour, he would have noted that Europe is not nearly so high up the country's agenda as it is up the Sun's. There was booing when Jonathan Dimbleby moved away from crime and education to take predictable European questions. The "real people" are far angrier about non-delivery of improved public services than their newspapers have, so far, reflected.
The opposition has thus been concentrating on a narrow agenda that obsesses the political classes, while ignoring the vast social agenda where Labour is really vulnerable. In that, at least, our tousled, tired and (I hope) pensive Prime Minister is still Lucky Tony.
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