The Brilliance of Blair

My mum would kill me if she saw that headline on anything I'd written.

But, for the first time in recent memory, I actually had a positive conversation about Tony Blair will an office colleague this week. Honestly.

Why? Well, who couldn't help but be impressed with the way he took on the TUC on Tuesday and, in my opinion, won?

Trade unions do have a role in life. They are there to help people in the workplace. They aren't their own political parties and the world would be marginally more understandable if they kept to their original brief of looking after the workers.

Since when was Government foreign policy anything to do with the RMT? Can you imagine Bob Crow's mob running the war in Iraq?

Sgt Major: "Strike!"

Bob Crow: "Come on then lads, you heard what the man said. One out, all out."

If I was Tony Blair, I'd have not even mentioned foreign policy in my speech to the TUC. I'd have stuck to the success of the minimum wage. The fight to sort out pensions. Why Labour's changing the NHS.

But he didn't. He took them on, and won. So what if Commando Crow and his motley men walk out? They're not even in the Labour Party anymore. You have to be in it to influence it, to distory a Lottery phrase, Bob.

The speech itself was pretty ordinary. Usual scripted fodder. But it was adlib at the end which was at its best.

At the end of the speech, he went on, much to many's surprise: "However difficult it is, however fraught our relations from time to time, make no mistake - I want the TUC to go on being addressed by a Labour Prime Minister not to addressed again by a leader of the opposition."

All of a sudden, everything became clear. Labour needs to work together if it is to remain in office. Labour won in 1997 because the Tories were in disarray.

It took one sentence, that's all, for Tony Blair to put a lid on everything that has rumbled on for the last week or so. One sentence. And I'm naive enough to believe those spin doctors around him weren't too sure of what he was going to say.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The problem with Tony isn't Tony, it's his cronies who think they're protecting their man when, more often that not, they've hurt him.

Time for Tony to be the real Tony, even if that means not trying to be your 'regular kinda guy.'