Very nice, Mr Blair, and ever so humble

Dame Edna Everage used to have a song about the importance of being nice. It was, as I remember, largely a matter of clean underwear, fresh flowers and pleasant smells. Lady Thatcher, though by no means deficient in the areas which Dame Edna considered important – or so one assumes – never pretended to be nice. Mr Tony Blair, by contrast, has made it his stock-in-trade, the nice man leading the nasty party.

Mr John Major, as it happened, was just the same. But the voters unfortunately did not view matters in that light, except briefly in 1992. Mr Blair has been luckier. Recently, however, there were signs of slipping. Hence the campaign of the last few weeks, which has several aspects and is designed to show that he is really very nice after all.

Most obvious were his interviews with Mr Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight. I remember Prime Ministers who gave one interview to that programme, usually at party conference time, but three in a row is unprecedented. I do not want to detract from the enterprise of Mr Paxman or, more likely, of his less famous colleagues. But Mr Blair would not have invited the BBC into No 10 at all if he and his advisers had not thought it in his interests to do so.

It might have gone hideously wrong. As things turned out, I thought, the three rounds produced an honourable draw. In the second, largely about foreign affairs, Mr Blair was unclear whether the object of his policy was to dislodge Saddam Hussein, secure the entry of UN arms inspectors into Iraq or do both. He was clear – which may prove important – that UN authority was required before we joined in any military action against Saddam.

The proportion of boxing fans who understand how and why points are awarded by the judges is tiny. Likewise the proportion of viewers who score a television interview as the political correspondents do is, I suspect, smaller still. People judge by general impression, by whether or not they like somebody.

My late mother, who was intelligent, of a Conservative disposition and then 70 years old, used to say that she did not "like" Lord Home. I would ask her how she could dislike someone whom she had never even met and who was merely a flickering image on a black and white screen. But so it was. And so do people, as sensible as she was, continue to judge politicians.

Mr Blair has mastered a new form which even the redoubtable Mr Paxman failed to break down. It is to admit cheerfully that things are bad but to go on to claim optimistically that they would be worse with the other lot in power and that, above all, they are going to become much better. It is a technique reminiscent of those pensions firms which are now in the news and about which Mr Paxman omitted to question the Prime Minister, no doubt because he had other matters on his mind. It is very difficult, usually impossible without a good deal of persistence, to discover how much your pension is worth at any given moment.

"At the proposed retirement date," the companies will say, "your fund, according to our projections, should be worth an estimated..."

And they go on to name a sum beyond the dreams of avarice.

"That's very cheering news," you reply, "but what is it in fact worth now?"

At this point all sorts of difficulties seem to present themselves. The companies repeat their original formula. It takes a lot of effort to arrive at the truth. Similarly with Mr Blair. After five years, it is still a policy of jam tomorrow, and it still seems to work.

With Mr Paxman, he appeared to be at pains to emphasise how little power to change things he really possessed. Perhaps this was a deliberate counter to the "presidential" charges which had been laid against him and had, he thought, done him harm. It was the late Conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott who once said that we were at sea in an open boat without map or compass. Mr Blair did not go quite so far as this. But there were times when he seemed to be moving in that direction.

This new-found humility of Mr Blair can also be located in last week's proposals for the House of Lords. The original proposals, following Lord Wakeham's Royal Commission and Lord Irvine's White Paper, were for a second chamber whose elected element was as minimal as the Government could get away with comfortably. In a slight skewing of history – "rewriting" is probably too strong a phrase – the plan was transformed last week into the favoured infant of the Lord Chancellor who has, in his historic ceremonial capacity, been made to carry the Great Can of State.

But it was equally the product of Mr Blair, most of the Cabinet and, on the back benches, Mr Gerald Kaufman, who did not prove representative. Among the intake of 2001 there was a revolt. There was another change too after that election. As Cliff Gladwin of Derbyshire observed after he had scored the winning run against South Africa, cometh the hour, cometh the man. Here it was was Mr Robin Cook.

After the election Mr Blair shifted Mr Cook from the Foreign Secretaryship to the Leadership of the House. For 18 years in opposition Mr Cook had been the brainbox of the People's Party, or what we shall now have to call the Pornographers' Party. But he had scarcely occupied his old exalted status inside the Foreign Office. Instead of giving up, he determined to prove himself all over again in his new job.

Contrary to mythology, the best Leaders have not been hearty House of Commons men but, rather, intellectuals of a certain independence of mind. Examples are Richard Crossman, who developed the committee system and unsuccessfully tried to reform the Lords, and Norman St John-Stevas, who established the present committees and was sacked for cheek.

Mr Cook is of this kind also. The final decision is to be left to the Commons following the deliberations of a joint Lords-Commons committee. A body of this nature was what had originally been proposed in the 1997 manifesto. But first there was a delay, then a Royal Commission. So we are back where we started – with Mr Cook the apparent clear winner.

But politics are rarely so simple. The week also saw the House reverse its decision to take the appointment of committee chairmen out of the hands of the Whips. Mr Cook had supported this decision. When he was asked about this reversal at Prime Minister's Questions, Mr Blair replied briefly that the House had spoken. And that was that. Mr Cook has been given a shock which may yet be repeated over Lords reform. Truly, it is not always easy to be nice.