The return of the grin

AND with just one report he was free... Only 18 hours earlier Tony Blair had been staring a humiliating defeat square in the face. Had his tuition fees Bill been voted down by his own backbenchers, he would have been damaged - undoubtedly seriously, quite probably fatally.

But at 7.20pm on Tuesday, he took his place on the green front bench to hear the tellers tell of his scrape to victory: 316 to 311, the thinnest of majorities. And it was a majority created not by the soundness of his ideas nor by the brilliance of his arguments, but by Gordon Brown and John Prescott, who determined that defeat was unthinkable and drummed their supporters through the 'aye' lobby.

Their actions ensured Mr Blair's survival, but the thinness of the majority meant that he was battered and bloodied, and a blow from Lord Hutton would have sent him reeling.

Yet come 2pm yesterday afternoon, there he was back in his place on the front bench, and he was exonerated. He had behaved perfectly correctly, quite impeccably, absolutely unimpeachably. Even if Mr Blair's chief spin-doctor Alastair Campbell had written the report, it wouldn't have washed Mr Blair so white.

Beside him - amazing to behold - sat his Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, who had also come out in clean in the wash. He was a man so apparently damned that "beleaguered" had become his Christian name. For months, Beleagured Hoon had been a dead man walking, but yesterday he was a revived man sitting in his rightful place at the right-hand of the Prime Minister on the Government's front bench.

This has been a dreadfully murky affair involving emotive and wrong intelligence, unelected private advisors pulling the strings that sent Britain to war, and the most unsavoury death of a Government employee.

Yet so complete was yesterday's turnaround that Mr Blair was able to wear the face of innocence profoundly wronged. And he was able to seize the moral high ground.

"We can have the debate about the war; about WMD; about intelligence," he said, adopting his favoured manner of a priest in the pulpit. "But we do not need to conduct it by accusations of lies and deceit. We can respect each others' motives and integrity even when in disagreement."

Michael Howard squirmed on the bench opposite. Of course, it is too premature to call the next election 15 months hence, but we may well look back on this week - the week billed as the most traumatic of Mr Blair's premiership - and say that it was the week in which Mr Howard lost the election.

Mr Howard is already coming under fire from his own backbenches for his failure to support Mr Blair's Tory-esque tuition fees. His failure to offer even a semblance of an alternative has made his party look vacuous.

On top of that, he has personally accused Mr Blair of lying about the outing of Dr David Kelly - a claim that a distinguished law lord has dismissed as unfounded, yet still Mr Howard presses on with it.

It may be that Mr Howard has been unlucky because, given the evidence, Lord Hutton's report is especially - one might even say unbelievably - kind to the Government. Yet, just like the BBC, he is accused of "betting the farm on a shaky foundation".

And it was extraordinary to hear the Conservative leader argue yesterday that cover-ups should deny the public information if they are likely to prevent political embarrassment.

And to compound it all, Mr Howard continued to say that it was "despicable" of the Government to leak Lord Hutton's report to The Sun - a claim, like Andrew Gilligan's at the start of the whole affair, which is not supported by a shred of evidence (although it does feel like it should be correct).

In the three months since taking over from Iain Duncan Smith, Mr Howard has generally bested Mr Blair in the Commons. Yesterday, though, Mr Blair employed against him the withering tone he usually reserves for wiping away the Liberal Democrats.

From the safety of the moral high ground, Mr Blair told Mr Howard: ''Being nasty is not the same as being effective; opportunism is not the same as leadership.''

And: ''Yesterday was a test of policy, you failed it. Today was a test of character, and you have failed that too.''

Even though it is premature to call the next election, Mr Blair will spend the intervening 15 months cosying up to his back-benchers. He would be suicidal to arrange another fight with them, and it would be unnecessary as foundation hospitals and now tuition fees have been bumped through. Labour, in disarray at the start of the traumatic week, will now unite in time for the electoral fight.

There will, of course, be scrapes as the Higher Education Bill continues its Parliamentary progress, but Westminster sensed yesterday that the high water mark of rebellion had passed on Tuesday night. Equally, it might also be the high water mark of Mr Blair's attempts at public service reform, but that's another matter.

There will, still, be scrapes as weapons of mass destruction continue to elude the searchers, yet Lord Hutton's finding that Mr Blair - and Mr Campbell whose performance on the stage at South Shields tomorrow should be fascinating - did not tamper with the intelligence gives the Prime Minister much room for manoeuvre. (Mr Hoon's relief may only be temporary if it is proved that he sent British soldiers into battle without enough kit to go round.)

You could hear Mr Blair sizing up the manoeuvre room yesterday. You could hear him reversing into it, saying that he might have made a mistake over the 45-minute claim, but, as Lord Hutton accepted, it was a genuine mistake, an honest mistake, a mistake any decent, ordinary guy would have made in the circumstances.

And Mr Blair will use yesterday to relaunch himself to the electorate as a decent, honest and trustworthy guy. After the years of Tory sleaze, his promise to be "whiter than white" was one of his greatest appeals in 1997, and without integrity a politician has no credibility. This is why Mr Gilligan's unfounded allegation that Mr Blair and Mr Campbell "sexed up" the dossier that took the country to war was viewed in Downing Street as so damaging. Mr Gilligan's unfounded allegation destroyed the very heart of Mr Blair's most prized asset. His Government is bedevilled by a reputation for spinning things up to suit its own purposes, but accusing it of sexing things up raised the stakes and would have dropped its reputation to a new low if it had not been challenged.

Plus on a personal level, Mr Blair is a man who is eager to be liked, and the slights upon his integrity have hurt him hard. Now Lord Hutton's most forensic inquiry has cleared him of any dishonesty, duplicity or underhand behaviour whatsoever, and he will use such a clean bill of political health to reconnect with the public.

That Lord Hutton's kind words come less than 18 hours after Mr Blair steered through Parliament a Bill that unquestionably breaks his election manifesto only adds to the irony of the situation.

But then that is Tony Blair. He is truly Teflon Tony: his opponents can't stick one on him and no mud sticks to him.

On Tuesday night, Gordon Brown might have retired to his chambers proud of his status within the party that allowed him, at the moment of his choosing, to engineer Mr Blair's survival. But come this Thursday morning, Mr Brown remains as Chancellor and remains holding his unfulfilled leadership ambitions.

Mr Blair, of course, remains as Prime Minister, and with just one report he has bounded free from his detractors. It was incredible to witness.