IRAQ/BRITAIN: The war in Iraq caused him severe political damage but there are few signs yet that the electorate is willing to dump Tony Blair, writes Frank Millar.
Suddenly, for a few blissful hours at least, it was possible to forget about the war. Gordon Brown was magisterial in the lead role, and Tony Blair's rapture was palpable. For the chancellor was delivering his eighth Budget and with it - both men are clearly convinced - the sun-lit uplands of a historic third general election victory for Labour. This seeming oddity is a necessary corrective to much that is written about both the state of Blair's Britain and the Blair premiership.
Anti-war protesters will march on London today to mark the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
The platform speeches will rekindle lingering suspicion and resentment that the Blair government exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and that the allied action has left the world a more dangerous place. And the denunciations of the Bush/Blair doctrine of "pre-emption" will echo across a capital city chilled by repeated warnings that an al-Qaeda terror strike is a question of when rather than if.
One poll this week found three quarters of all Britons feel more vulnerable as a result of the military action in Iraq. Yet it also found almost half the public still think Britain was right to go to war.
And while the polls give a mixed message about future voting intentions, even those recording Conservative gains place the party nowhere near the over 40 per cent level of support necessary for an opposition party at mid-term to have confident expectation of victory come the election.
For all his party's bitterness and division over the war, moreover, the indications from the polls are that Labour voters specifically still approve both of the war and Mr Blair, and rate his government fairly highly in terms of competence and delivery.
Big-time delivery on that domestic agenda (and an increasingly worn promise of "world-class" public services) has of course thus far proved as elusive as the search for Saddam's weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Downing Street admits concern at least over a problem of perception. Voters, they say, are reflecting an increasing level of satisfaction based on personal experience of schools and hospitals while still subscribing to an impression that services are performing less well at a national level. Against that, Number 10 claims increasing acceptance that the slowness of change is the result of under-funding during the Tory years.
Moreover, while there is a slow-burning recognition of Gordon Brown's "stealth tax and redistribution" policy, ministers detect no evidence that the electorate is ready to abandon the public services in favour of tax cuts and what they will increasingly portray as Tory "passports" to greater private provision.
Nor, crucially, do the Conservatives. To the contrary, shadow chancellor Oliver Letwin has actually promised to match Labour spending on health and education while freezing all other departmental budgets. Hence the delight spread across the prime ministerial countenance on Wednesday. For as the chancellor spelt out with relish, this would mean a real terms cut in spending on everything else - including areas presumed more advantageous to the Tories, including defence, law and order and the "war" on terrorism.
As Blair and Brown hope, so many Tories fear Mr Letwin has walked them into a trap with a strategic miscalculation equal to that of the late John Smith, whose pre-election "tax and spend" budget proposals helped Labour lose the 1992 election.
In one vital respect Conservative leader Michael Howard is connecting with the voters, who share suspicions of a multi-billion "black hole" in the chancellor's spending programme and tax rises postponed only until after polling day. But as Anatole Kaletsky observed in The Times, the double-bind for Mr Howard is to escape the Letwin trap and to finally decide whether he wants to reduce the national debt or cut taxes.
The war also presents Mr Howard with a challenge. For after a promising start, he is at risk of fulfilling his earlier reputation as a somewhat slippery fellow with highly opportunistic attacks on Mr Blair. The Conservatives were chief cheer-leaders for the removal of Saddam, WMD or no WMD. A supreme Atlanticist, Mr Howard knows that - had he been prime minister - he would have acted precisely as Mr Blair did in standing "shoulder to shoulder" with the American president.
And his attempts to exploit Mr Blair's domestic difficulties have provoked warning shots from the Daily Telegraph, on whose support he will be counting.
In the Commons on Wednesday, Mr Howard showed some awareness of this as he stood should-to-shoulder with Mr Blair in response to the Madrid bombings and the fallout from the Spanish election, warning that no-one in Europe could opt out of the fight against terror.
This reassertion of Westminster bipartisanship was timely, coinciding with the question inevitably in the minds of people following the success of the Spanish Socialists: could it happen here? And it encapsulated the prevailing wisdom here as to why Mr Blair should not necessarily fear a similar fate to his friend and former ally José María Aznar.
That show of unity, however, could not dispel the terrible knowledge that the question - like the character of the British people - might only be truly tested by tragedy. And with the political and security authorities agreed that an attack is probably inevitable, Mr Blair is terribly aware that his government's prospects could yet be determined by forces over which neither he nor his chancellor have control.