FOR a man who has spent most of the past year under sustained attack, Tony Blair did not appear yesterday to be a man under mortal pressure.

It must be the beaches of Barbados beckoning.

With consummate ease, he dodged all the main questions, saying that the issue of Dr David Kelly's death would have to wait for the inquiry and the issue of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) would have to wait for the inquiry team.

He quipped that Nasser Hussain had had a harder job than he as England cricket captain, but Mr Blair showed himself very adept at avoiding the bouncers without giving an edge by which he could be caught out.

He conceded, though, that the trust of the electorate may have to be regained, and he feels he can do this best by focusing on public services. Some might say that this is because he knows he will never be able to justify his Iraqi war. More sensibly, though, it is because he believes that he can ride out the Iraqi storm. The fall-guys - Alastair Campbell and Geoff Hoon - have been identified and the Hutton inquiry has reduced the immediate temperature. By the time the inquiry reports, the issue will have gone tepid: Saddam, he hopes, will have been caught and the full extent of his evil will have been paraded across the world's television screens. It will therefore be a little embarrassing for Mr Blair's critics to carp on about the small matter of the lack of WMD.

And so it will be the domestic agenda on which Mr Blair will be judged.

On this score yesterday there was a smidgeon of good news for him when a Eurostar train broke the British rail speed record on a new stretch of £1.9bn track.

That Eurostar has been able to whizz around the Continent but creak and wheeze through Kent has been a national embarrassment.

The Eurostar broke a British record that was set, amazingly, in December 1979 when Margaret Thatcher was at the very beginning of her reign and when our roads were full of early Ford Escorts and Morris Minors. Our cars have certainly progressed since then; our trains only did yesterday.

Our railways still trail those of France. Top average speed in Britain is GNER from York to Stevenage at 113.6mph. In France the top average speed is 161.2mph.

So Mr Blair can at least point to yesterday's record as showing how money is going into one public service with an improved end product.

The only problem for those not wanting to travel to Paris or Brussels is the state of the rest of the rail network, especially if improvements to the West Coast line are put back a year.

Which sums up Mr Blair's end of term report: progress, albeit slow. Must deliver more if he does want to rebuild trust.