Strange bedfellows

Britain is a country that prides itself on not being Continental, but after its lame home-grown "Dump the Pump" campaign failed, it relied on its French cousins to show it the way. This enabled fewer than 3,000 people to achieve in five days what 50,000 miners and an entire Labour movement failed to do in 15 months in 1984-85. They brought a government to its knees. Only it's a Labour government.

This country has seen nothing so surreal since Diana died three years ago. Back then, normally rational people stockpiled flowers without being able to explain to themselves why they were doing it. This week, normally rational people have been stockpiling bread and milk when supermarkets limited them to three loaves and five pints each. They, too, cannot explain why they were doing it because no individual can eat three loaves before they go stale nor can one person drink enough tea to use up five pints. But then, these are the same normally rational people who've used up all their petrol driving around looking for petrol.

And just as when Diana died there was a sizeable minority which dared not say that she didn't quite deserve the status of sainthood that was being given to her, so this week there have been many people who have dared not say that the fuel protestors are not quite the heroes they are portrayed as. Instead, just as everyone agreed three years ago that Diana did not deserve to die young in a car crash, so everyone this week has agreed that they would like to pay less tax.

It has been such a crazy week that the Prime Minister, who rarely pays attention to Parliament, must have wished that Parliament was sitting. At least in the House he might have been able to hide behind the inadequacies of the Opposition and he might have been able to point out some of the interesting inconsistencies of the dispute: farmers demanding higher subsidies and lower taxes; 2,000 protestors claiming to be on the verge of bankruptcy but financially-secure enough to leave their jobs for a week at the drop of a hat; Tory newspapers demanding the same tax levels as Europe while saying tax harmonisation is a terrible by-product of the evil euro.

He might have been able to muse on the pitfalls of the age of single-issue politics where every topic is misunderstood in splendid isolation - where indignation about paedophiles leads to paediatricians being driven from their homes. He might even have been able to ponder on the nature of democracy when 20 pickets, elected by nobody, are seen voting on whether a tanker of fuel could be allowed to leave a refinery for a certain hospital where hundreds of lives lie at risk.

But no, Parliament was still in recess. Mr Blair had only the media to face. It was a media fuelled by the high-octane indignation of 100 per cent of the people who don't like paying taxes, and he found himself caught like a rabbit in the headlights of an on-coming petrol tanker. So transfixed was this normally astute politician that he offered himself up as a hostage to fortune. He said things would start returning to normal within 24 hours. Over 72 hours later, 80 per cent of garages were still dry. Mr Blair's personal credibility took a direct hit, and the first polls showed his approval rating dropping from 51 per cent to 44 per cent. (This may come to be regarded as a good result for Mr Blair as his French counterpart Lionel Jospin, who caved in to the protestors, has just seen his approval rating plummet by 20 per cent.)

Yet, such is the nature of this crazy week, the same polls showed the Conservatives becalmed with 32 per cent of the electorate's support, still 15 per cent behind Labour. TV bulletins reporting the worst industrial crisis to hit the country for 15 years could barely find space for the Opposition leader who could offer no alternatives to the policy which had caused the crisis.

With an election possibly six short months away, anyone aggrieved to the point of outrage by a government's policy would normally be rallying behind the opposition. But there were no "up with Hague" chants; only "down with Blair".

This crazy situation may well explain the rest of the week's craziness. The protests were an explosion of anger because no one in authority has listened and there was no one else to turn to. They were an explosion of anger because our political parties have become too similar to each other and have grown too distant from the people.

There are other pointers about the nature of Britain today to be gleaned from the last week. For starters, what have we done to our police forces? In the past they were accused of heavy-handedness when trying to break up disputes - if it had been miners or Grunwick workers organising themselves with laptops and mobiles, they would have had them smashed out of their hands by truncheons. But now, just as at the May Day riots and the Notting Hill Carnival, the police stand meekly by. It is an offence to block motorways by driving very slowly - it is dangerous driving at worst or "wilful obstruction of a public thoroughfare" at least which carries a fine of £1,000 or 14 days in prison. If a couple of ordinary people who thought their council tax was too high protested in this way, they'd be arrested before they'd reached the end of the sliproad. Tractors and lorries on a rolling roadblock are given a police escort.

But then it has been a crazy week. We are consistently told that we live in the electronic age, that ours is an e-economy. Yet for all the on-line shopping on the Internet and all the websites, a nation will fall apart within days if it is deprived of something as filthy and industrial as petrol and the dirty hunks of metal, wrought into lorries and cars in grimy factories, have to be laid aside.

It has indeed been a crazy, crazy week - but also a fascinating one. Two defining moments will now remind us of the days of Tony Blair's first government: the People's Princess and the People's Protest.

And because Mr Blair failed to understand the latter as he did the former, it is now a little less likely that he will win the chance of a second government than it was seven surreal days ago.