Blair cornered by US alliance.

(From Canberra Times)

T ONY Blair seeks to address what he calls ''the problem of trust''. Yet his attempts to defend the war against Iraq lead to further slippery explanations.

During the past few days he has erected dividing lines over Iraq that do not exist and was caught out on the BBC's Today programme claiming that all his fellow world leaders believed the pre-war intelligence.

John Humphrys quoted Vladimir Putin expressing severe doubts about the intelligence, one of several leaders who did so. Mr Blair moved on.

He is trapped. What else can he do but dance around the impossible questions in the hope that memories of what he said in the build-up to war will fade and that the appalling aftermath in Iraq becomes less bleak? In a way that is easily underestimated, ''trust'' was the essence of Mr Blair's early appeal and that of the New Labour project. After its fourth election defeat in 1992 Labour's internal polling showed that voters still did not trust the party to run the country. It was a lack of trust, above all other factors, that explained the loss of the election. The early New Labour pitch could be summarised in a single soundbite: ''We've changed. You can trust us.'' Now the leader who created the conditions for such a soundbite to resonate is not trusted on the biggest decision of his tenure.

There is a dark irony to this. As Mr Blair pointed out in his speech this week he has stuck closely to the manifestos he put before the electorate in 1997 and 2001. Take a look at the Conservatives' manifesto for the 1970 election or Labour's programs in 1974 or, indeed, Margaret Thatcher's manifesto in 1979. What followed was very different from what they claimed.

Partly because of his obsession over the need to secure the trust of voters, Mr Blair proposed a limited range of achievable policies and most of them indeed have been implemented.