AS he heads for the dry-cleaners this weekend, with his blue shirt in his hand, Tony Blair will be in a moderately happy mood unless there happens to be a Danish pastry shop on his route from Downing Street.

This week, his party has done enough to regain a slight lead over the Tories in the polls. It appeared more supportive of him than at any time since he took over as leader in 1994.

In his own warmly-received speech, he had set the agenda for the next election a bold agenda not of cutting taxes but of spending instead on public services; a potentially dangerous agenda because the British people always talk of their concern for others, but in the privacy of the polling booth usually put their cross elsewhere.

And he had managed not to sweat all over the living god who is Nelson Mandela.

Mr Blair also knows what he has to do in the next month or so. Pensions have to rise. Hauliers and farmers have to be bought off. And avoid crises. That's all.

On his contented journey to the dry-cleaners, he might have spared an idle thought for Gordon Brown, who confirmed this week that he is the powerhouse of New Labour and yet straddles socialism enough to be attractive to Old Labour. Mr Brown will make a worthy successor, he might muse.

There might also be a thought for Mo Mowlam, making her way back to her Redcar constituency after her last conference as an MP a talent and a popularity of which he never made the best use.

And for Alan Milburn, his neighbour in Darlington, who made an impressive conference speech but whose political career hangs in the balance if there are people dying on trolleys during the winter flu crisis, Mr Milburn's head will roll after all the money Mr Brown threw at the NHS earlier in the year.

Then the Danish pastry shop hoves into view, stopping Mr Blair in his tracks. How is he going to present Thursday night's referendum result so that it fits his party's stance on the euro?

This has always been his weak spot not in policy terms but in the fact that he is out of step with the majority of the country. The Danes have been pegged to the euro since it came into existence, so they weren't voting on the economic theory of the single currency that Mr Blair believes will persuade the British. They were voting on the belief that they would lose some of their Danish identity if their little country was subsumed into a larger continent.

Most worrying of all for Mr Blair is that this is where William Hague is at his strongest. Having ruled out joining the euro for the next Parliament, the public and companies such as Nissan knows exactly where he stands.

Yet the mere thought of his neighbour over the River Tees would have reassured Mr Blair. The same poll yesterday that put Labour two points ahead of the Conservatives showed Mr Blair with a negative approval rating (-12.7) which was not as bad as Mr Hague's (-15.4).

Only 11 per cent of the electorate think of Mr Hague as a "capable leader".

This, above all else, is what Mr Hague must address next week in Bournemouth. The jokes and they will be good ones will be about the Dome, the irreducible core, fuel and 75p. We know that.

But will there be any substance? How will Mr Hague square his tax-cutting rhetoric with his plans to maintain spending on the NHS and education, and to increase it for farmers, pensioners, hauliers and prison-builders? Will there be a cohesive vision rather than a populist collection of disparate, and often contradictory, issues?

With just seven months likely before the election, Mr Hague must, on Thursday, deliver the speech of a Prime Minister, brimming with ideas, initiatives and potential. The time for the knock-about stuff he does so well has gone.

If Mr Hague fails, Mr Blair will be able to think that, barring another unforeseen calamity like the petrol crisis or an economic downturn, he is as nearly home, pressed and dry for a second term as the blue shirt he will pick up from the cleaners on Tuesday after 11am