Steve Richards: Tony Blair has entered John Major territory - and there is no easy way out

The atmosphere is feverish to the point of madness. When Tony Blair makes a casually modest and qualified confession, it becomes a moment of breathtaking significance. In an interview in Australia, Blair admitted that his pre-announced resignation was possibly a mistake.

I do not know what they are making of these few words in Australia. If they have any sense, they will enjoy their glowing blue skies and move on. Over here in the grey dampness, we explode with excitement. His words are seen as the launch of a new bid to stay in power for years or, alternatively, as a sign of an inner turmoil that will end in his departure by the summer.

Neither theory sustains more than a few seconds of scrutiny. Blair gave his interview a few hours before a big speech on foreign affairs. He will not have wanted to deliberately upstage his own performance in the flattering context of a doting Australian parliament, one in which he had friends to the left of him and allies to the right. Fleetingly during that parliamentary speech it must have felt like the early days here, when the sun shone as a new day dawned and the big tent of support was crammed to a point where disillusionment was inevitable.

Blair is a leader who follows politics with the eye of a journalist. He will have wanted the speech and the flattering response to be the main story yesterday morning, rather than more speculation about his leadership. He knows that persistent headlines about his future are destabilising. He made a small mistake in acknowledging that he might have made a mistake. Nonetheless all hell has been let loose. Australia must be getting hotter with all the heat being generated.

Almost lost in the sweaty excitement is the issue of substance. Did Blair really make a mistake by announcing in the autumn of 2004 that he would not fight a fourth term? I do not believe he did. The situation is febrile now, but it would have been wholly out of control if the Labour Party and the media were working on the assumption that Blair was going on and on.

Indeed, Blair makes a myth of his recent past in even suggesting that he had the freedom to make a mistake. Such apparent introspection suggests that his decision then was an act of free will. He ignores, or chooses to forget, the context. Blair made the dramatic announcement on the eve of a heart operation and knowing that this newspaper had discovered he had bought an expensive London house. He was reeling still from Iraq. He bought himself political space by declaring he would fight the next election, but not a fourth.

To understand what is happening now, we must recall what happened then, how he used the space in 2004. Partly, Blair sought to exclude Gordon Brown from the pre-election planning and placed his old ally Alan Milburn at the heart of the campaign. He hoped that Milburn and other political friends would thrive to the point where one of them could succeed him. Instead, his allies under-performed, and Brown was called back to play a major part in the election campaign. Now Brown waits with growing impatience.

In terms of Blair's own current thinking, even some of his close allies detect a state of denial. They tell me he does not, almost cannot, focus on the prospect of departure. Whenever the issue is raised, he moves on to other issues. There are public signs of this mindset. He has said several times that he plans to ignore all the speculation and "get on with the job". This is why there is a single significant development in the Australian expedition.

The prime ministerial entourage has briefed for the first time that Blair has decided on a departure date in his own mind. If this is the case, it is a very recent internal decision. More likely, the revelation is another sign of weakness from Downing Street's point of view. The media- obsessed aides felt that some new scraps had to be fed and came up with the new formulation.

It will not keep people satisfied for very long. In recent weeks, Blair has made three substantial speeches. All of them have gone largely unnoticed. This is incomparably more serious than a slip in an Australian interview.

One speech was in Sedgefield on the evening after the vote on the schools' Bill. In some ways, this was the most important. A great deal of work had been put into the event. In it, Blair had hoped to signal that in spite of his dependence on Conservative support he planned to stay in office for a long time. The message was swept aside by the focus on party funding, the loans and the peerages.

A few days later, he made a speech in London to coincide with the third anniversary of the war against Iraq. It took place on the day Labour's National Executive Committee met loftily to review its procedures in the light of Blair's apparent misdemeanours. The lofty NEC captured the headlines. Now there is the latest frenzy about his future, wiping out a thoughtful speech to the admiring Australian parliament.

This is John Major territory, the era when a prime ministerial speech was hailed as a relaunch, only for noises off to divert attention. For Major, there never was a relaunch. It became impossible in the end for him to even contemplate a recovery, let alone stage one. Now we have the more extraordinary sight of the great agenda setter unable to set the agenda anymore.

There was a time in the 1990s, when Blair could utter a banality and for the words to be widely hailed as a new philosophy. I recall an early interview in which he declared that Labour believed in high standards in schools, and that was the great dividing line with Major's government. This vacuous observation attracted front-page headlines greeting "Blair's Schools Revolution". Now he makes meaty speeches on the global situation as an experienced Prime Minister and he is lucky to get any headlines at all.

There is no easy way out of this. Blair and Brown can make no more private "deals". Their relationship is too bad for that. If Blair were to announce a departure date in advance, his authority would be gone by the end of the sentence. It could get very nasty over the next few months.

There is one way out. When Paddy Ashdown resigned as leader of the Liberal Democrats, unexpectedly Blair phoned him to express approval at the dignified timing. "You got out on your own terms and when no one expected it. I am taking notes," he half-joked. For his own sake, as well as his party's, Blair needs to take a look at those notes. He must surprise us soon.

s.richards@independent.co.uk