While globe-trotting Tony Blair is trying to solve difficulties abroad, problems are mounting at home. Frank Millar, in London, discerns public exasperation with the British PM
Not such a happy new year, then, for Tony Blair. It started off well enough, with the family's post-Christmas sunshine break in Egypt. Nor could the occasional diplomatic barb put Tony or his wife, Cherie, off their stride during a six-day swing through the Indian sub-continent.
Certainly they both looked the part: Cherie glittering in a selection of Indian designer outfits; Tony resplendent in his Nehru jacket, hands clasped in Hindu greeting, looking every inch the world peacemaker. By the time the jet-lagged Prime Minister returned to Britain on Tuesday morning, however, he would have known his fellow citizens were losing patience with his enthusiasm for foreign forays.
Travel closer to home - and from home to work - was weighing rather more heavily with them as they faced initial delays which quickly gave way to industrial action which now threatens to extend to the entire rail network across the country.
And, of course, any instinct to see that Mr Blair might have an important role in calming a dangerous confrontation between India and Pakistan was further checked by the discovery that the man notionally in charge of Britain's roads and railways, the Transport Secretary, Stephen Byers, was also unwinding in the Indian sunshine while hung-over Britons shivered on station platforms awaiting trains running late or not at all.
"Notionally" because, whatever the reality, the widespread perception is that this Prime Minister is, to a quite exceptional degree, the man in charge of virtually every aspect of government. Academics, historians and commentators (and probably many opposition politicians, too) know the absurdity of this. Yet the perception persists that when Mr Blair is focused on "the big picture" of the moment not much else happens in his administration.
In part this is because so few members of his cabinet have yet established themselves as premier-league players in their own right. In part, too, it derives from Mr Blair's obvious need to take charge of whatever crisis besets his ministers.
John Reid, like Mo Mowlam (and even Peter Mandelson), has to play second fiddle when it comes to Northern Ireland policy. Nick Brown had to be nudged aside when foot-and- mouth ravaged the countryside and threatened to derail last year's election plans. Tony took charge of the floods and now operates as his own Foreign Secretary. New Labour's man for every crisis, one disrespectful cartoon recently depicted him in fireman's uniform on his way to tackle the bush fires in Sydney.
To No 10's certain discomfort, that mocking tone is growing as a chorus of complaint about the public services combines with the threatened wave of rail and postal strikes to revive unpleasant memories of another Labour government's infamous - and electorally ruinous - Winter of Discontent.
Tory MP Graham Brady captured the mood on Wednesday in the Commons when he invited Mr Blair to investigate the health problems of a constituent during his "current visit to the UK". The parliamentary sketch writers caught it, too - the Guardian's Simon Hoggart brilliantly with this offering: "Coming from India, Mr Blair tends to cling to a nostalgic idea of a past Britain, a land where courtesy rules, crime is low, and the railways are the envy of the world. He told us how almost all crime was now lower, and described the miraculous coming rebirth of the railways under New Labour. Of course, if he actually lived here he'd have a very different idea of how things are."
There was no joking about yesterday's front-page headlines. "The Dark Age of Strikes Is Back" feared the Express. "You're wasting our lives, Byers, and we're sick of it," declared the Mirror. Most damning, however, were those proclaiming the admission by Europe Minister Peter Hain that Britain now has the worst railways in Europe.
In the Commons on Wednesday, Mr Blair just about defended Mr Byers as the Transport Secretary to bring much-needed long-term investment to the railways following the disaster of Tory privatisation. That view was rubbished by the Liberal Democrats leader, Charles Kennedy, who suggested Mr Blair might wish to explain why - five years into a Labour government, with a three-figure majority and the benefit of relatively benign economic conditions - transport policy remained "a shambles".
Now here was Mr Hain, telling the Spectator magazine the first-term Blair government had started its investment programme "far too late". In an interview last week - as the railways were already bypassing the National Health Service to become the government's No 1 problem - Mr Hain said: "We have the worst railways in Europe. We started transport investment far too late. It is an intractable problem. We should have been more radical earlier."
Mr Hain was obliged to issue a statement yesterday reiterating his support for the government's policy (as he was last week, when his enthusiasm led him to suggest British membership of the euro was almost inevitable).
The problem for Mr Blair is that nobody outside his government has much of a clue as to what the government's transport policy is and that - courtesy of John Prescott rather than Stephen Byers - those who use the tubes and trains had concluded long before Iain Duncan Smith that, whatever it is meant to be, it truly has "descended into farce".
Mr Blair, of course, remains blessed by the quality of his political opponents. Seven months after granting him an unprecedented full second term, there is no evidence yet of Mr Duncan Smith making any impression on the voters, or of the country looking to the Conservatives as an alternative government-in-waiting.
That said, the Prime Minister has been put on notice that blaming the Tories for everything wrong with the state of Britain begins to look more than a little threadbare into a second Labour term he himself dedicated to "delivery". Nor should cynicism attend his desire to focus international attention on the problems of Africa, or his vision of Britain as a global force for good.
He knows, however, that the next election will turn on persuading the voters that he is, first and foremost, a force for good government at home.
•Frank Millar is London Editor of The Irish Times