Tony Blair doesn't want to be president, he's quite happy as chief executive

Tell me, as Tony Blair sits down to a two-hour tête-a-tête with President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, does he really think he is going to get anywhere with the Middle East peace process? Is it part of his view of himself as a world statesman? Or is it just a cover for enjoying the sun while issuing gloomy messages to the rain-sodden citizens of Britain?

Six years after taking power, our Prime Minister remains as elusive as ever. It's not that he doesn't tell the public what is on his mind. It is not that he doesn't speak of his beliefs and hopes often enough. It's just that, as time goes on, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine what really matters to him and what is just politic.

When push comes to military shove in Iraq, will he (as he will) say, with an air of extreme gravity, that it is the right and only thing to go to war because he believes it or simply because he's agreed to go along with whatever the Americans decide? When he declares, as he did again this week, that he sees the decision on the euro as "the single most important decision that faces this political generation", is he saying it because he believes it, because he wants to bounce the Chancellor into agreeing to a referendum, or more simply because he wants to put the blame on Gordon Brown when the verdict on the five economic tests is "not yet". Or is it all of them together?

I am not accusing the Prime Minister of hypocrisy or even insincerity, because Tony Blair has the knack of all effective communicators of believing what he says at the moment he says it. Nor would I categorise him as a particularly calculating politician, although he is clearly a very deliberate one. He is not a Harold Wilson whose ambiguity arose from a conscious desire to disguise his hand, nor a Harold Macmillan whose elusiveness stemmed from an actor's taste for playing differing roles at any one time. And yet Tony Blair has so far proved more difficult than his predecessors for commentators or even his own colleagues to pin down.

The answer, I think, is that he is something new in British politics, a master of tone. The great communicators of the last generation, Mrs Thatcher and Mr Wilson, sought the soundbite as the weapon of choice for the television era. The generation before them sought the sense of direct conversation or address to an audience of radio to tell their story – Franklin D Roosevelt's fireside chats and Churchill's speeches. In both cases, words mattered as a way of creating images. Tonal politicians, on the other hand, rely not on the words but the emotions behind them and the silences inbetween.

Read Tony Blair's New Year message, and you will find the words on the whole stiff and bureaucratic. He has no ear for language as such. But watch or listen to him and you feel here is a person saying something terribly important to you. The voice breaks at a certain moment, the hand clenches and the pause between quite arbitrary parts of the sentence becomes almost painfully extended.

His friend Bill Clinton was the first master of this style, of course. At moments such as the Oklahoma bombing in 1995, he was able to turn a situation of national humiliation and personal uncertainty into a point of dignity and transcendence by his tone of grief and restraint.

An American president is head of state as well as premier, so the sound matters more than in Britain. And Blair's use of the technique has put the backs up of many who see him, wrongly, as trying to take on the mantle of presidency. But it does give him that air, as well as a sense of righteousness, that has made many talk of him as a latter-day Gladstone, a Churchill by ambition, even.

He isn't. All this talk of Blair seeking world statesmanship, of wanting to be the first European president and giving up domestic politics seems to me wrong-headed. Blair wants to be chief executive and chairman of Great Britain, not president. He enjoys the job. And rather in the manner of the CEOs of large corporations, he sees his role in global terms, and foreign countries as markets in which British experience and influence can be projected.

Europe is our local region, so of course we should play a key role there. But then America is by far the biggest and most important business centre, so we have to win there, particularly as we have natural advantages in long-established ties and language. And, like all corporate chiefs, he sees the disturbances – terrorism, local conflict, Middle East tensions – as problems that need solving if business is to thrive.

In that sense, Michael Ancram is off target to complain that the Prime Minister is neglecting domestic affairs for the lure of the world stage. Tony Blair is very conscious of health, transport and work. They are his home patch and the concern of his customers. But there is an array of divisions in place to handle the domestic market. Policy can be set at the centre by the whizzkids in No 10 and then handed down to the divisional directors for implementation. Overseas relationships demand the constant attention of the chairman himself.

Only Britain isn't a corporation, the world isn't just a market and all the players in it aren't all men of similar outlook and interests. As circumstances have moved beyond the stage of selling plans to the voters as investors to delivering services to them as customers, so it seems that Tony Blair has been left clinging to his rock of rhetoric as the tide of events has moved around him.

In the real world of power politics, it isn't in Britain's gift to accelerate or even bring about Middle East talks. All his efforts have achieved is a rather embarrassing silence as to when a Palestinian meeting will take place in London and when and where the American "road plan" for peace might next be discussed.

Tony Blair might wish it otherwise. He does wish it otherwise. But out there in the hard world of international politics, a pro-American stance and the desire to be a leader within Europe are not compatible. The Prime Minister can't have it both ways, not when it concerns a subject so profound as war and peace. Nor when it involves so central a question as joining the euro.

And the more difficult the Prime Minister has found the going, the more intense has become his tone. The silences between words become longer, the fists more tightly clenched, the voice a little bit more pleading. You have to believe me, it says, I really, really do want peace in the Middle East/an end to queues in our hospitals/to join the euro/to reduce crime at home/to restore democracy in Northern Ireland. And all the while events have moved off to where words have to mean something and policies have to achieve results.

Which is why I believe that Tony Blair's New Year message was not meant for us at all. It was a memo to himself. And he's right. There hasn't been a time when he has been confronted "simultaneously, by such a range of difficult and, in some cases, dangerous problems".

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk