FROM ridding the world of poverty in Johannesburg to cleaning up the streets of Ferryhill in 24 quick hours.

From opening a modest community hospital in Sedgefield to tackling the menace of Saddam Hussein in Iraq within the blink of an eye.

The life of Tony Blair must pass in a blur and yesterday, for a nanosecond, the people of his County Durham constituency were caught up in it.

A motorcade of buses and cars swept through the streets as journalists from every corner of the world pursued the Prime Minister's every move.

In Chilton, at the closed-circuit television (CCTV) headquarters, a handful of constituents were pinned against a wall.

They fiddled nervously with their clothing and looked as if they were about to face a firing squad. But they were not considering their final request, rather how they would respond when Mr Blair asked them about the work of the Sedgefield Community Rangers.

"Have you been cooking?" asked a Carelink controller through her headset. The Chilton headquarters is linked to 7,000 people in sheltered accommodation, and a fire alarm in a house in Newton Aycliffe was going off. "Get a towel or a newspaper and wave it underneath and it will stop a little bit quicker."

As Mr Blair, who landed in Teesside from Johannesburg at 7.30am, passed behind the Carelink controller the alarm in Aycliffe could be heard to cease. It was 11.15am.

But the journalists from Switzerland, Sweden, Iran, Saudi Arabi, Australia and the United Arab Emirates were on the trail of another alarm: that involving Iraq.

They watched in bemused fashion as Mr Blair was talked through a recent emergency in Ferryhill, which Chilton's CCTV cameras had seen.

"We picked up this car going on to the pavement, running someone down and then reversing back over them," said the controller.

Mr Blair clicked his teeth. You just can't believe the extent of the evil in the world, be it in Ferryhill or Baghdad.

Then he was off. The cavalcade toured the back lanes of his constituency, dropping into Mainsforth where row upon row of abandoned colliery terraces run up the bank, their downstairs doors bricked up, the glass in their upstairs windows bricked in.

Then, from the old North-East it climbed to the new in Sedgefield, passed the Winterton Park executive development where the windows in the homes are shaped like the doors on the Trumpton clock.

It was approaching midday, the sun was out, and the £8m community hospital was opened.

"For those of you who don't know, the weather is always like this," said Mr Blair, who 48 hours earlier had been in shirt sleeves beneath the sun in Mozambique.

A lone huntsman on top of a brown charger took up sentry duty on the roundabout outside the hospital, blowing his hunting horn in frustration at Mr Blair galloping through a ban on foxhunting.

But the huntsman's quarry quickly got away, the cavalcade growing bigger by the minute as the main event neared.

Today, Sedgefield Community College reopens as a specialist sports college having won £400,000 for floodlit tennis courts and Astroturf football pitches.

Yesterday, its hall - newly painted for the occasion - hosted an international Press conference at which Mr Blair was live and unspun.

He had no advance notification of the questions and the British media, sensing that there is a real and growing divide between him and the British people, gave him a thorough 90-minute testing.

"This is becoming an endurance test," he said, as wave after wave of questions about Iraq washed towards him. "Which one of us is giving in first? I'm not."

In fact, he finished with his most coherent argument.

"I hate war," he said, "as does anyone with any sense. The terrible thing about it is that innocent people die as well as the guilty ones.

"But I am also aware that if I wasn't to confront this issue now, and Iraq got ballistic missile technology and used it with chemical or biological weapons, and I thought back and could have done something to stop it, I would have it on my conscience."

As the motorcade rushed away after the Press conference, a fire engine stood outside the new hospital with its lights flashing. An emergency. But some emergencies are bigger than others, and the one Mr Blair is grappling with is bigger than any