LONDON LETTER: This should be a moment of danger for Mr Tony Blair. Yesterday he celebrated his fifth year in power.
Today some 6,000 seats will be contested in the English local elections, and a dollop of "mid-term blues" would seem to be in order.
All the evidence suggests the British people remain deeply ambivalent about this New Labour administration and now - most alarmingly from Number 10's perspective - seem to consider it every bit as sleazy as its Tory predecessor.
Two weeks ago the Chancellor, Mr Gordon Brown, defied a 20-year consensus suggesting voters expect taxes to travel only in a downward direction, boldly challenging middle Britain to pay for the world class health service it says it wants. Even as the polls show the punters approving this gamble - with all the attendant charges of a return to distinctly Old Labour ways of tax and spend - they reflect, too, a worrying suspicion that the extra money won't make the necessary difference.
And the past two days have seen Mr Blair under fire and in seeming retreat over the perceived crisis of street crime. While the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats accused him of a cynical election ploy, Labour ministers openly refused to endorse his plan to withhold child benefits from the parents of lawless children and persistent truants.
Meanwhile, the latest in an endless series of anti-crime initiatives had the government pledging to locate police officers in hundreds of the most troublesome schools around the country. The relief of the Downing Street spin doctors was easy to imagine as Queen Elizabeth took centre stage on Tuesday with an address to parliament marking the start of her Golden Jubilee celebrations. For as the queen prepared for the journey to the Palace of Westminster Labour voters found grim breakfast reading in their Daily Mirror.
"Accused" screamed the headline over its ICM poll charging that things had got worse, not better, under New Labour, with trust in Mr Blair down and half the public believing the government has done "badly" on the key issues of crime and public transport.
An earlier YouGov survey for the Daily Telegraph echoed the message that it is in those areas of policy in which the government is most forcefully pledged to deliver - education, health, crime prevention and the railways - that the public reckons it has failed. While the largest group of people surveyed gave Mr Blair, like his government, a modestly "fair" performance rating, almost as many gave the lowest ratings as gave the highest. And an absolute majority concluded Labour had failed to "clean up politics" or to "rebuild the bond of trust between government and people" as promised in the party's 1997 election manifesto.
Over half those surveyed thought the government had "too often been manipulative and less than honest in its dealings with the media and public" as opposed to just 13 per cent who believed the opposite. And while one in three, 36 per cent, more generally thought the government had "on balance, been honest and trustworthy", 49 per cent said it had not. So after five years a picture emerges of public perceptions approving the Blair government's handling of the economy, Northern Ireland and international affairs, while heavily critical of its performance in its own priority policy fields, and viewing it overall in something of the same tawdry light as the Conservative administration which went before.
That said, the clear majority of Britons have no regrets about Labour's coming to power, and still favour Mr Blair as prime minister. In other words, they appear as ambivalent now as in 1997, wanting to believe but remaining unconvinced, with support still wide and at the same time shallow.
All of which should be good news for Mr Iain Duncan Smith and his followers in today's elections. Except that Mr William Hague's former spin doctor, Ms Amanda Platell, raised her elegant stiletto and punctured the Tory pipedream. Saying what everyone else suspects, she concluded that this otherwise eminently decent man simply doesn't have the necessary star quality to compete with Mr Blair. And while Tories may content themselves that she doesn't have an impressive record when it comes to picking winners, they might just think that she should be able to spot a loser when she sees one.
Mr Duncan Smith himself said people would form their own "take" within three or four months of his assuming the leadership.