Given that he is leader of the Opposition, he remains, strikingly, the outsider, more at home at home than in the House.This has been a source of strength to him. It allows him to speak his mind more plainly and helps ensure that, when he does so, his mind is nearer in instinct and expression to the vast mass of relatively unpolitical voters whom Labour needs to reach.But it comes at a price, which the hooded old curmudgeons of Labourism are now demanding, with menaces For there is no such thing as “New Labour” There is Mr Blair, the fresh face, and his supporters. He doesn’t know the code words, or which arm to twist, or who it is wiser to be nice to. He became a Labour candidate with relatively little knowledge of the party and has never bothered to steep himself in its culture and internal power system. Weare a more knowing lot and we have a political system in which outsiders can’t suddenly arrive at the top.Yet, in a way, Blair has been seen in the tradition of Dave and Congressman Smith.

(A deep well down which Newt Gingrich is currently dangling his bucket.) We British don’t normally go in for this. It was an American fairytale in the tradition of Mr Smith Goes to Washington, the famous 1939 Frank Capra/James Stewart film about a heroically naive Congressman.These are lost innocence fables, based on the superiority of homey, commonsense values over the corrupted, out-of-touch political elite. And what will happen, almost certainly, is that opinions will harden about Blair, that his strengths and weaknesses, blurred thus far, will become more nakedly obvious as the months proceed.
Today, Mr Blair is almost in the position of “Dave” in the Kevin Kline film about an ordinary bloke who finds himself impersonating a dead US president and wins over the people because of his unpolitical naivety and directness. There is no doubt that the year ahead will be both difficult and decisive for Blair’s reform of Labour. The Prime Minister was right to point out that these are days of rare volatility, and to predict that the beady glare of media scepticism will now turn on the Opposition party and leader. Is it all coming apart? Is Tony Blair human after all? John Major wished Labour a horrible 1995 and, on the basis of the first ten days, the gods were listening to him.

There followed a split over education among Opposition spokesmen; a rising re volt over Clause IV; and ducking and weaving over rail privatisation from the leadership. It’s about a businessman giving away prizes at a girls’ school who is stuck for something to say to the umpteenth girl, so he asks her what she plans todo when she leaves school “Well”, she says roguishly, “I had thought of going home.”. She greeted him with unparalleled condescension as he sat in his carriage, but he was unimpressed. “Madam,” he said, “the face is familiar but the name escapes me.”Some of these stories are really just jokes dignified by the dust of anecdotage.