Listening to British Prime Minister Tony Blair you sometimes have to ask yourself what Britain he now inhabits.
It isn’t the Britain of the sulphurously hostile focus-group floating voters. Nor is it the Britain tracked by Professor Paul Whiteley, director of the British Election Study, which currently points to a hung Parliament, with the Conservatives as the largest single party.
And it certainly isn’t the Britain that a cross-section of Blair’s close supporters, colleagues and advisers, encountered over recent days, think they live in, either.
Listening to Blair, you hear the same unvarying judgement of the current state of the nation. Iraq was right. Bush is okay. The security situation is going badly, but it has got to be sorted. When — not if — that happens, things will improve. Everything can be got through. The June elections won’t be as bad as people expect.
As Iraq improves, people will see that his Labour Party is delivering domestically. When it comes to the general election there will be fresh energy. That will open the way to winning not just a third term but the European referendum too.
Hearing this message, the first reaction is disbelief. You realise that Blair simply does not realise how bad it is for him out here. Essentially, he is still saying what he said before the war. Back then, he would say that Iraq would be transient and finite. Once it was out of the way, the left would get over it and middle Britain would reward him with a third term in which he could continue to govern as the big-tent election winner of 1997 and 2001.
But we are way past there now. If his theory was true — which, to be fair, it might once have been — it has now been almost entirely destroyed. Blair needs to act decisively, and in a very different way, if he is to extricate himself from the crisis of confidence in his leadership.
To talk as though further shows of determination and faith are all that are required to bring things round is either very brave or very stupid. It’s like pressing on towards Moscow as the snow starts falling.
How can someone with such good political antennae and instincts have become so convinced that he still possesses what so many think he is losing? People say he has started reading the papers again. But what does he see there that encourages him to be so resilient?
Perhaps his advisers pull their punches, conscious that inertia is a great factor in politics. Perhaps his pollsters paint him only the part of the picture that he wants to see. Or has he simply closed his mind to what the rest of us are hearing all the time?
Here is my theory. Most of us are formed by the politics in which we grew up. Blair is no different. His formation took place against the background of the catastrophic failure of the Labour left in the early 1980s. He recognised, more clearly than almost anyone, that Labour would have to break with that culture to be electable again.
When his moment came, on the death of the previous Labour leader, John Smith, 10 years ago this week, nothing that had happened in the interim had done anything to shake that original belief.
Ten years ago Labour still needed to prove itself to the voters before it could regain their confidence. Blair put this beyond doubt, not just by his attractive, youthful qualities but by the symbolic deed of slaying clause four. He forced the party to confront itself, and he forced the public to notice the party had done so.
Since then, it seems to me, Blair has increasingly fallen prey to the belief that, when in doubt, he will always gain electorally — no matter what the circumstances — by confronting or ignoring his party rather than by listening to it.
This can indeed be a useful instinct for a prime minister and, on particular issues, one must concede that it may still apply. But Blair has become conceited and insensitive about applying it. Perhaps success went to his head. Perhaps he surrounded himself with too many advisers who themselves despised the party.
Whatever the causes, the net result has been a gradual disconnect — driven overwhelmingly by him rather than them — between Blair and those from whose ranks he emerged. He largely ignores and forgets the fact that his party, the United Kingdom and even the British left moved towards him in the mid-1990s. They were prepared to make new compromises with him, and they did so.
Truth to tell, they probably still are.
He, though, was not willing to reciprocate. In office, it became an increasingly one-way relationship — and it is now near breaking point as a result of United States President George W Bush. Almost no one I know in the Labour Party has ever been persuaded by Blair’s claims about the Bush relationship and all the paths down which it has led him.
Faced with such unanimity, however, Blair’s response continues to be the one he learned in the 1990s — that the party is always wrong, and that he will always prosper by defying it. The great paradox is that Blair is stuck in the politics of opposition.
And indeed Labour could soon be in opposition again unless he is prepared to adapt and change. It is almost unbelievable that someone who, 10 or 20 years ago, possessed such a brilliant and creative approach to the task of making Britain a modern and prosperous social democratic nation should have become so rigid in his determination not to save a project that, ultimately, is not just his but ours too. But that’s how it seems.
Most frustrating of all is that Bush’s policy in Iraq and the Middle East — which is pivotal in every way to all of this — continues to throw up events which, in the hands of someone who really grasped the paramount domestic political need to take a truly independent British stance, could provide just the right opportunities.
Whether it is the Sharon plan, the assault on Falluja, the treatment of Iraqi prisoners, the position of US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, or the broader question of the future of Iraq after the June 30 handover, we are currently witnessing a succession of opportunities to stake out principled and, above all, independent British positions.
All of these would bring tears of relief to Blair’s supporters, none would involve lurching into knee-jerk anti-Israeli or anti-American positions, but, taken together, could begin the process of liberating Blair — and us — from his self-inflicted shackles.
If he takes these opportunities, he will re-engage with the Britain the rest of us inhabit, and he will be welcomed with mostly open arms. But he has got to face up to the need to do it, the need to carry it through, and the need to be seen and heard to do it. It is a challenge that a truly great leader — a Roosevelt or a Gladstone (and certainly a Disraeli) — would not refuse.
The dreadful mood of the party and the country gives him little choice. He has to listen and to change, for otherwise there might soon be only one option left.