A hard man to pin down

Yesterday the press came to nail Blair, but he evaded them. Now he must show us what he's really made of

What will history make of the man? As parliament broke until October, there he stood at his second prime ministerial press conference bestriding the nation - to say nothing of Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Palestine and all of Africa. More than that, he bestrides the Summer Splash play scheme for deprived children, the adult numeracy and literacy targets and the 15-month inpatient waiting list, no detail too small, no world crisis too big.

Since the press conference was interminably long, so long that it descended to the shocking state of northern railway bridges, there was much time just to sit and contemplate the leader. His visage is unimpressive, his features ill-defined, his persona unremarkable. Some of the gargoyles of the press pack offer much more emphatic presence. Consider Thatcher's iron image at the height of her powers, which is so long-lasting people still want to knock her marble head off. Or Churchill's orotund omnipresence in the national imagination; Wilson's dry and wily wit; or Macmillan's foxy charm. Here instead is, well, just an ordinary kinda guy. How will history mould the memory of this elusive man? Slippery, I wrote at first, but that is the wrong word: he is not evasive, nor insincere by the standards of his predecessors, yet he remains hard to pin down, open to much interpretation. Third way was less a cunning device than a deep state of being. He is still a prime minister in waiting, waiting to do one great thing worthy of his unprecedented power.

For who ever commanded so much? After five years, two wars, foot and mouth, stock market meltdown, political dramas from dome disaster to dicey donations, black rod lese-majeste, economy with truths, fiddling of figures, control freakery, spin mania, he has not just survived, he still sweeps all before him. Exposing himself to a quiverful of arrows from the mighty parliamentary committee chairs, not one bolt touched a hair on his body. Yesterday, although the lobby were determined not let him escape unscathed again, there was not a hit, not even a nick with a rubber tip. How relaxed, at ease and unafraid he seemed, how agile at avoiding any killer TV quote. Now he has come out from behind the spin protectors who did him such harm, he finds the enemy disarmed by his new glasnost.

The dogs of the lobby it was who died of boredom by the end, looking at their watches, longing for lunch as he fielded question after question from randomly unpredictable foreign and regional correspondents. "I'm happy to take every question," he said sweetly to the flagging sea of reporters. "Would it be better to take everyone, or just two more and call it a day?" "Call it a day!" the defeated room mumbled back like a classroom begging for the school bell. Shockingly some members of the old lobby slunk out before the end of the class, bored both by questions big (Africa) and questions small (children). They dared not engage in the usual Westminster village bullying miasma under the full glare of the live cameras. They shuffled off, their bluff called, Wizards of Oz exposed as little men in green glasses, while the PM strode away with a holiday spring in his step. Extraordinary.

The final taunt to the lobby was his insouciant invitation to them to join him at his next press conference in Sedgefield in September. Sedgefield! How they yearn for a return to the old foetid basement of No 10 where their daily secret jousts with Alistair Campbell could brew up hot politics out of thin air. Those days are done, the lobby is a dead duck and instead in the airy splendour of Carlton House Terrace, foreigners and specialist correspondents concerned with the substance of policy not the froth of Westminster will dilute that poisonous cabal into homeopathic harmlessness. Or that's the idea. The public gets to see and hear, many more questions are answered on the record, and the PM himself will be open to all comers once a month from now on.

Triumphant in the polls, there is no opposition beyond the sorry spectacle of disarray and dismay on the Tory benches: their loss of direction is not Labour luck but the direct result of Labour success. This week yet again Iain Duncan Smith died a croaky death at prime minister's questions, his deckchair reshuffle revealing not so much a split as a party shattered. But though Tony Blair walks on political water, he remains a mystery: what voters cannot pin down, they instinctively distrust. How rare it is to hear much warmth anywhere for him. There is a growing, if grudging, sense that delivery is finally on the way. There is admiration for his Teflon toughness, but still suspicion of a man without ideology. His private Christian values may be enough of a spiritual guide for him, but a secular country needs political idealism and sense of direction.

Well, they may be about to get it. The autumn may begin a display of political bravery and self-assurance that will be a real act of conviction. Barring unforeseen trouble, the signs are that Blair is finally ready for the great referendum battle on the euro, the bid to turn Britain at last into a wholehearted member of the union. If not now, at the height of his strength and Tory weakness, then when?

There has never been any doubt that he and his chancellor intended to achieve it. There is an element of deliberate deceit in Gordon Brown's secretive intentions: it must be his decision, he will say when the tests are met, but when prudence himself declares the time is right, then the tectonic plates of public opinion will shift and we shall see what a deft hand he has played. Ed Balls, his top man, is a genuine non-believer in the euro who has given the impression that his master too is a sceptic, but that only helps the plan along. Wait for the Brown bear to step out of the Treasury waving the tests in his paw. Then for all its rough edges, the Blair/Brown project will be displayed at its most effective: together they will have decided to risk all on this.

It will be a battle of ideas, a knock-down, drag-out declaration not just of European solidarity, but of European ideals. However often Blair protests - as he now does frequently - that the choice between the US way and the European way is a false dichotomy, that is how the euro campaign lines will be drawn: one vision of the good society will be a conservative model combining warm beer little Englandism with wild west US free marketeering. The other will be European social democracy, well-regulated capitalism and a welfare state. That will be the choice.

It doesn't require turning our backs on the US (why wantonly alienate so important an ally?), but it does require defining and finally settling our geopolitical identity. It is how the referendum will be won, because the political tide is with social democracy, not with US conservatism. The prime minister's new self-confidence that makes him now willingly confront hostile battalions with such sang-froid may even be a preparation for the real battle ahead to make Britain truly and permanently European.