Is Mr Blair homing in on No 10 again?

DRIVING the back road through Tony Blair's constituency, there is some bricks-and-mortar evidence that his Government has delivered. Beside the neatly manicured front lawns of the north end of Sedgefield village is an old road sign pointing to the community college. It is now a specialist sports college having had, Mr Blair said yesterday, "a quarter of a million pounds new investment".

Beyond the new traffic-calming chicane which is designed to cut speed but guaranteed to raise blood pressure, is a sparkling £8m community hospital. It replaced the pre-fab hospital, built temporarily 60 years ago to house casualties from Dunkirk - the pre-fabs's footprints can be seen a little further along the road, but the huts themselves have been removed as progress has been made.

Then, on the site of the Victorian Winterton asylum, is a development of palatial executive homes, designer-built with an ecclesiastical feel. Behind them is the NetPark, home to companies which do whizzy things with "astronomical instrumentation and digital enterprise technologies".

Finally, to Fishburn which was an eyesore when Mr Blair paraded George Bush along the road just 16 months ago for fish and chips in a local pub. Back then, behind Fishburn's monument to its past which is a miner claustrophobically crawling between two lumps of rock, the old peoples' homes were boarded up and derelict. Now they're gone, new private homes springing up for a future generation of NetPark workers.

Education, health, new industry and home-owning prosperity even for a humble place like Fishburn...so how come the MP for Sedgefield is only a couple of points ahead in the polls?

On the doorsteps, even in Sedgefield which is a long, long way from Iraq, people recall the weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. This election is all about trust: do you trust the bricks-and-mortar evidence before your eyes; do you trust Mr Blair, or do you trust the Tories or the Liberal Democrats?

The loss of trust is the first question the Prime Minister must answer...

THE best way to think about trust is that people trusted me to end boom and bust and provide a stable economy - we've done it," he said in the snooker room of Trimdon Labour Club where yesterday the real 2005 General Election campaign began.

"They trusted me to invest in public services - we're doing it.

"In relation to Iraq, it was a difficult decision, but sometimes the time you should trust a politician is when they are taking difficult and unpopular decisions.

"I took the decision on the evidence we had that it was better, on balance, to remove Saddam rather than leave him. With greatest respect to people who disagreed, I think it is important that we now look forward.

"Iraq is now an emerging democracy and the whole of the region is more stable. If we hadn't taken action, he (Saddam) would still be there.

"But it is more profound than that. (This election) is about whether people trust you to take the right decisions for the country and to move the country forward. In the end, it is a choice between myself and Mr Howard, between Labour and Tory.

"If people don't come out and support us, all those bricks and mortar, improvements I think people genuinely see, will be rolled backwards."

In yesterday's speech, Mr Blair concentrated on education - concentrated apart from a tender moment when his wife Cherie absent-mindedly picked at a bit of fluff on his dark jacket pocket. It happened as he reached No 2 on his list of ten ways Labour will improve education, and he faltered, looking down to see what the fiddling was about.

He quickly regained his momentum with a list of Sedgefield schools that had benefited - Trimdon Grange Infants, Middleton St George Primary, Wellfield Maths and Community College, and Ferryhill comp "now a specialist business college, results doubled in just two years". Another journey through his constituency.

The Conservatives, though, are making much of indiscipline in these schools. There might be new classrooms, they say, but they are irrelevant if teachers don't have the tools to keep order.

"We are giving headteachers the powers they need and making sure excluded children are properly dealt with," said Mr Blair. "It's like with the health service where the Tories want to focus all the attention on MRSA. No one is saying that that is not a problem, but if you look at the health service and at our schools as a whole and ask the question are they better than there were in 1997, I think it is quite hard to dispute that they are."

The other side of the trust coin is fear - fear that Labour will have to put up taxes to pay for its improvements in bricks and mortar.

"We put up National Insurance for the NHS and even if you take that into account our tax-take as a proportion of national income this year is way below the European average, lower actually than many of the years Margaret Thatcher was in power," he says.

"Nobody likes paying taxes but in the end it is important that we have the services we need.

"We can't write the Budgets for years ahead, but the real question people ask is are there unfunded spending commitments that we haven't got the money for, and the answer is no."

On the regional economy, Mr Blair was asked about PD Ports' call for strategic help in developing a £300m deep water container port at Teesport as opposed to along the over-crowded south coast.

"Teesport obviously has a very good case but my problem is that planning applications have to be decided according to certain rules and I can't comment on individual applications," he said.

"But I know there are still a lot of families who are in difficulty and a lot of people who would like the chance of work. "In today's economy, there are jobs that will go as, unfortunately, at Phillips in Durham.

"But there are new jobs coming in all the time. If you look at some of the new industry that is here - Amtel, Orange, Sage, Filtronic on the old Fujitsu site - there's a lot that's very positive, and just up the road you have the NetPark which has tremendous potential.

"There's every reason to be confident and optimistic about the economy of the North-East, provided we keep the general economy stable."

The last time Mr Blair was campaigning in the North-East was for a yes in the referendum on a directly-elected regional assembly. The answer was overwhelmingly no.

"We still have a regional policy without the assembly and that is through the development agency co-ordinating inward investment," he says. "It's incredibly important that we keep the regional development agency, keep its budget intact - and the Conservatives are going to cut a lot of its funding.

"But it is also about reinvigorating local councils," he added.

Labour's manifesto will see a return for the concept of directly-elected mayors. He said: "Even though I am making a point against my own party as Hartlepool and Middlesbrough have chosen non-Labour mayors, I think people have welcomed them, and Ray Mallon, to be fair to him, has done a very good job."

IN his speech, Mr Blair urged the national media who had stepped outside the Westminster bubble to journey through Sedgefield, to see the bricks and mortar, see the SureStart centres at Ferryhill, Chilton and Newton Aycliffe.

"See what's happening in the real world to the lives of real people," he said.

In the real world on the road outside Trimdon Labour Club, the Up North Combine pigeon lorry was trying to return crates to local fanciers, but security at the club meant the lorry couldn't get through. It had to leave the empty crates stacked up on the kerbside.

"There's bad crack among the pigeon lads," said a fancier

The birds had been released in Selby at 10am and had been back home within 90 minutes. "Mine came in seventh out of 150-or-so," said a fancier. "Not bad, but it's the number one you want, isn't it?"

For Mr Blair, it is the No 10 he wants - can his journey take him there for a third time from Sedgefield?