Screengrab from Downing Street's 'day in the life' of Tony Blair video. Photograph: PA
The prime ministerial Jag rolls into view and the next minute the premier is striding along amid a gaggle of children and sailors. "Morning, morning, or afternoon, I should say." It's just another working day for the iron man of Downing Street. "The hours are very long," he later confides. "I've never actually totted up the number of hours I do in any week but it's probably not lawful under some directive or other," he adds with a flippancy that would no doubt delight his friends in the unions.
This is just one of the golden nuggets packed into the "day in the life" of Tony Blair video released on No 10's website today, which is perhaps aimed at sending us back to work with a sense of purpose and solidarity with our revered leader.
The video runs the full gamut of the prime ministerial experience, showing Tony enjoying a kickabout with some footballing youngsters - and giving his abysmal first touch more public exposure - waving to anti-nuclear protesters, as well as cutting and thrusting in the Commons.
The most striking characteristic of the video is its confessional air, presumably designed to make Mr Blair appear more human and diminish the old reputation for control freakery. He admits, for instance, that prime minister's question time is a good opportunity for "mugging up on everything that's happening around government". But, before the viewer gets a chance to wrestle with the idea that maybe the PM should know all this stuff anyway, he summons a mythical figure to his aid: "I remember Mrs Thatcher once saying to me …".
"Being leader of the opposition," he says, in what appears to be an oblique dig at the emerging Mr Cameron, "does not prepare you quite adequately for the difficulty of doing the prime minister's job, just because it's a completely different order of stress, challenge, pressure." Or, to put it another way: Cool it, sonny.
He counsels, just before the video moves on to "foreign policy" shots of his meetings with world leaders, "Facts, facts, facts, always get the facts first," before adding: "The quality of research you get is very, very important." Hmmm. Unfortunately, this also comes shortly before a glimpse of President Bush signing papers, accompanied by the PM's expression of pride at "getting things done".
Is all this intended as a cheeky poke in the eye for Mr Blair's antiwar critics, or am I just reading too much into it? Probably the latter. As Mr Blair says, one of the great trials of being PM is that "everything you say is on the record and subject to the most minute scrutiny". So spare a thought.
