The morning of the broadcast, Richard and Judy were very concerned. “Apparently, because all that summit nonsense in Nice carried on until five in the morning, he’s only had one hour’s sleep,” Judy fretted, in the way of all mums. “How’s he going to manage?”
“He’s a pro,” Richard replied, making it clear that it takes a pro to know a pro, and that he, Richard, would be able to take 48 hours of continuous live questioning on the state of the NHS even if he’d never slept since the day he was born; and that was what he’d basically done last year when Judy went off to self-indulgently have her woman’s operation. “Tony Blair is a real pro.”
But that was exactly why Ask the Prime Minister seemed like such a duff proposition. Tony Blair is a pro. He modulates his voice and does all the pauses and says “Look here” in a flustered way, and generally plays the crusading, holy Prime Minister in exactly the same way the young Derek Nimmo would in a celebrity cameo on Casualty. He’s got all the nice-leader-of Britain moves down pat. You knew that from the second Ask the Prime Minister was mooted Tony was jumping up and down going, “Yippeee! I’m really good on telly! I’m going to do that thing where I look all concerned, but explain I’m basically powerless to change anything, for a whole hour! Hoorah!”
However, despite Richard Madeley’s confidence, it was not a fit-looking Prime Minister who appeared in a flurry of self-important theme music on Tuesday night. He’s not really looked mountain-fresh since 1997 - ideally he needs to smother himself in Olay Overnight Renewal, wrap himself in clingfilm and spend a fortnight unconscious - but even the same make-up woman they use for Stars in Their Eyes couldn’t disguise the red-rimmed exhaustion that made Tony look as though he had a piece of bacon Sellotaped under each eye.
The fact that the set appeared to have been based on the last scene of Close Encounters of the Third Kind didn’t help, either. While the BBC would have just pulled up outside Hull Town Hall in a small van, arranged some chairs in a circle and dressed the set with two glasses of water and a carafe, the guys at ITV had constructed a huge, luminous walkway for Tony to walk down - slightly stiffly, as if he’d neglected to do his stretchy-leg anti-thrombosis exercises in the plane back from Nice - and a weird rotatable glass lectern for Tony to preach from, which looked suspiciously like the one Anne Robinson has in The Weakest Link. It was all very Light Entertainment. You were constantly expecting the Prime Minister to either a) break into his impression of the man from Go West, or b) hazard a guess as to which was the greater measurement: two pints or one litre.
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Inspired by the set, the obligatory Dimbleby they’d hired for the occasion - Jonathan, in this case - decided that tonight, he was going to be Anne Robinson. As the first ten minutes of asking the Prime Minister degenerated into a Kilroyesque moaning session about how rubbish the railways are, and Tony nodded and sighed and explained that he was concerned, but basically powerless, Dimbleby weighed in with a classic Robinson one-two. “Why don’t you get in there and tell them to speed up?” he asked.
“That’s what I have done!” Tony said indignantly.
“Well, they’re not doing much about it, are they?” Dimbleby sneered, in exactly the same way Anne Robinson says, “You claim physics is your specialist subject. I can’t see anything special about that answer.”
As the evening wore on, this three-way dynamic between Anne Robinson, the Kilroy rabble and a man who’s volunteered to fly a Boeing 747 after both pilots had heart-attacks and is getting increasingly depressed by the other passengers’ ungrateful demands for more nuts became more pronounced. Audience members would ask unbearably specific questions in aggrieved tones - like why the drug Interferon B wasn’t available to all patients, or why a nurse who’d taken a year out to do a degree should be put back on a starter wage - and Tony would do a face to suggest that it was all he and Cherie ever talked about, but you know, Israel! Ireland! I haven’t slept since 1997!
Meanwhile, Jonathan Dimbleby was waging his own private Robinsonesque war of discipline with the audience on two fronts: reading and clapping. Anyone caught reading their question from notes would be stopped with a shrill “No reading!”; while applause caused increasing vexation until he snapped, “If you clap too much, we lose time!” After a while you started to wonder if Dimbleby was in cahoots with the Prime Minister and being tetchy on purpose; as for every audience member he chided or attempted to quell, Tony would give a persecuted-but-caring smile - like the one Kaff in EastEnders used to do - and promise to look into their cases individually.
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And the more Dimbleby pressed him for actual answers on questions - rather than getting by with a Blair-shrug that said, “It’s terrible, isn’t it? Some kind of Prime Minister-figure with a huge majority should do something about it” - the more Tony seemed oddly, well, human, I suppose, given that all human beings feel harassed and powerless.
The Prime Minister’s masterstroke, however, was his big declamatory speech ten minutes from the end - a superb piece of timing and performance, consisting, as it did, of a rather tired-looking man who’d bonded with his audience flinging his arms out wide and almost wailing, “I’m trying my very, very level best. I really am. Can you imagine what it was like to know people wanted money and I couldn’t do it?”
It didn’t matter that Dimbleby cut in with the pointed - and correct - observation, “You chose to do it, Prime Minister”. By then, the magic had been woven. Tony had morphed from the leader of one of the seven biggest economic powers in the world, into the dewy-eyed Julia Roberts in Notting Hill - just a boy, standing in front of an electorate, asking it to love him.