Chris Lloyd meets Tony Blair in his Sedgefield constituency

TONY Blair lands at his house in Trimdon, County Durham, following a flight into Teesside. He's arrived via a crime initiative in Croydon, a Prime Ministerial grilling at Question Time and a Cabinet meeting discussing everything from the tax-raising Budget to David Beckham's unlucky break.

Before that, there was the Queen Mother's funeral at Westminster Abbey, at which he arrived with hours to spare from Prague. And he'd flown to Prague via England after a weekend summit with President George W Bush, in Texas.

His blue eyes dart around every corner of the room as if he's trying to weigh up which country he is currently in and who the people are who have been set in front of him. The camera flashes, and the queue outside his door of those who have been promised a few seconds with him grows longer by the second.

"I don't stop being a human being, wherever I am," he says, almost on auto-pilot, his eyes still searching for information, "but when the door closes and I'm with my family..."

But does the door ever really close? He replies with the only moment of uncertainty in the whole interview. "Yea...um...sort of," he concedes. "There are always people who come up and want you to sign things, or suddenly things come up urgently. The truth is, it is a 24- hour-a-day job, and I don't spend as much time with the children as I'd like to.

"But, on the other hand, we are lucky. We are a very strong, close family and, touch wood, the children are growing up getting used to it."

He's slowly switching the auto-pilot off. I demand some proof that he is a real person, and not a professional from planet politician who just happens to have landed for a moment in this place called Trimdon where a clean blue shirt, bought by someone else, chosen by someone else and pressed by someone else, waits for him to slip into.

"I play my guitar," he says, sounding a little hurt. "The last tune I played was that old rock'n'roll number, Shake Me. When we were out at the Bushes', in Texas, there was a little evening thing they gave for us and there was a band there and I simply had to get up and play it. It was just basic 12-bar."

For a moment, there's a note of childish wonderment in his voice. He's realised he's relaying an utterly improbable story about the President of the United States throwing a party in honour of this bloke from County Durham and, at the end of it, the bloke from Durham gets up and strums out a few chords of rock'n'roll.

But at least his eyes have now stopped roving and he's settled down. Tony Blair has landed. The interview can now begin.

SHINY, modern and new, but scratch the surface and all is not as it gleams. The new University of North Durham Hospital is an appropriate symbol of Labour's achievements in its first five years in office.

It is a huge stride forward, replacing an out-dated emergency wartime unit, built during the 1940s. Local people are proud, even grateful, to have a such a modern medical miracle in their midst - especially after being let down by successive governments over the past 40 years which couldn't afford it.

Yet the delight is tempered by the fact that the hospital is too small, and that to cope with its modern workload it may have to merge with its sister facility in Bishop Auckland, which isn't even built yet. Plus, there's the controversy over its funding: £97m from private sources, to whom the NHS will be beholden for the next 27 years.

It is New Labour in a nutshell: delivery tinged with disillusion, and a worry about the full extent of the final bill.

Mr Blair, many of whose Sedgefield constituents use the new hospital, bridles at such a suggestion.

"I think sometimes we can be a bit negative about things," he says, from his favourite armchair in his Trimdon home. "It's important to look at the glass as half-full rather than half-empty.

"I remember the old Dryburn Hospital that my mother was in and my sister was in, and the difference is enormous.

"The fact is that we will need to expand capacity for the elderly, but that is not to say that the new hospital isn't brilliant compared to what was there before. Likewise with Bishop Auckland. That's a fantastic new facility.

"If you look just up the road from here at the new community hospital that is being built in Sedgefield, there is no doubt that there is real work going on, and real change too.

"Part of the problem is that some parts of the media focus entirely on the negative. After a new hospital is built they say this and that isn't working and it's because of PFI Private Finance Initiative, but any new building has its teething problems. If you ask people working in the new hospitals if it is preferable to what they had before, they will say of course it is."

Mr Blair says that the most frustrating part of his first five years has been the speed with which change has progressed. "I'm as frustrated as anybody else," he says, "but the NHS has suffered from decades of under-investment and you don't put that right overnight. You can't even try to put it right overnight if you want to keep the economy in shape.

"We are following a plan: strong economy, as many people back to work as possible, and on the basis of that economic foundation, investment in education was going to be our number one priority and then we'd move on to the health service.

"That's basically what we've been doing."

Five years ago, education wasn't just the number one priority, it was education, education, education.

"You could list a number of achievements," he says, reeling them off. "We've strengthened the economy, so we've weathered the economic storm better than any other country in the western world. Lowest unemployment for over 30 years. Northern Ireland peace process. The minimum wage introduced for the first time, but I think that the achievement that I personally feel very, very attached to is the improvement in education.

"The fact that Britain is now ranked in the top eight education systems in the world is a very big thing for us. In my constituency, people can see that investment has gone in. Primary schools were the first step, but you can increasingly see that in the secondary schools here.

"My own belief is that the single most important thing we can ever do for the future of the country is improve the education system."

As per his plan, the focus has now moved from education to health. "There is no doubt at all that if you want to improve the NHS you have got to fund it, and the most efficient way is do it out of taxation," he says, defending the tax-raising Budget. "The issue is not whether we pay, because whether it is through general taxation, a tax on wages or out of your own pocket directly, you pay.

"The question is what is the best and fairest way of paying."

But, having got the Budget out of the way, having given Alan Milburn the tools - and the money - to reform and improve the NHS, there is a sense that the Prime Minister is already moving on.

"There are still a lot of other issues we have to tackle," he says. "The transport system is one, obviously, but I think it has actually got better since the turn of the year.

"Then there is the issue of crime and anti-social behaviour, which we are making a big push on. It will dominate our legislative programme for the first two years of this Parliament."

It is almost as if Mr Blair has come full circle. In September 1993, less than a year into his first major post of Shadow Home Secretary, he came out with the first soundbite that really got him noticed. Lest anyone forgets, it was: "Tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime."

In May 2002, he sounds so tough that he is practically zero tolerant of it.

He says: "I do think it is important that we get after even low-level crime, because when you start to be indifferent to the vandalism, graffiti, petty theft and the low-order street crime, you end up having a drug dealer in the street.

"Street crime isn't in every area - in County Durham crime has fallen - but it is particularly in urban areas. About 40 per cent of it is linked to mobile phones, and we have to deal with it in a pretty heavy way.

"We are now looking at making sure that people who are serial committers of these offences aren't given bail, even if they are very young. We are expanding secure accommodation places and prison places, and we are also speeding up the court processes.

"We are just going to have to come down on it very hard."

After education and health - and possibly crime, if the next stage of Mr Blair's plans come to fruition - Mr Blair's Government will be remembered for its presentational skills. Its reliance on spin doctors is a reason the public has come to doubt even the bricks-and-mortar delivery of something as undeniable as the University of North Durham Hospital. With billions of pounds of spending apparently re-announced almost weekly and figures massaged and news buried, growing cynicism was part of the cause of the low turnout at the General Election.

Mr Blair bridles again.

"I think there has been a lot of nonsense written about spin doctors," he says, explaining how, with the proliferation of a 24-hour media agenda, the Government is expected to have a comment ready on every conceivable subject at every imaginable hour of the day," hew says.

"Every government that is ever going to exist is going to have to have Press people to deal with Press enquiries," he says. "There is a cynicism, but that has partly been created because the media asks us questions, yet when they get an answer they say it is all spin doctoring.

"People should remember back in the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher had Saatchi and Saatchi and all the rest of it. The Labour Party used to be unprofessional, and it's only when we became professional and put our Press relations on a proper footing that people said it was terrible.

"It's just part of modern political life, really."

He also knows that the argument about spin doctors is a bit of a nonsense. It may keep the newspapers amused in the interim - and beating Stephen Byers with Jo Moore was a highly enjoyable national hobby for a while, if only because it vented the frustrations of stranded rail passengers - but in the end there can be no disguise.

If people are still waiting more than a year for operations, if their council tax is still exploding with no improvement in services, if you still can't get a reliable train to London, if your child still doesn't have a permanent teacher, if your neighbourhood is still blighted by nuisance crime, no amount of spin will be able to hide it.

Mr Blair knows it.

"We are exactly a year into the new term and I think to really make a difference, most governments need two full terms," he says.

"If, at the end of our second term, people can't notice any difference, they will be entitled to ask me some hard questions - and I'm sure they will.