Alan Watkins: What's dangerous about Mr Blair is that he knows Good and Evil. Or thinks he does

Blair has always treated liberty with the deepest suspicion

Like all the great Masters, Mr Tony Blair returns to his theme, usually in the same form. Thus Tintoretto kept painting Crucifixions, sometimes varying his work with the odd Last Supper or two; J S Bach would produce another fugue as soon as look at you; while the French novelists all told of the young man's struggles to make his way in the world of 19th-century Paris.

Likewise with Mr Blair. He comes back to the same subject: the struggle between Good and Evil. Sometimes, it is true, he dresses it up in different words: Freedom and Oppression, say, or Democracy and Tyranny - there are several different disjunctions conveniently to hand.

In the United States, the fashion for high-flown but windy rhetoric started with J F Kennedy or, rather, with his speechwriters, whom it would be tedious to list in this space. Mr Blair, much influenced by Mr Alastair Campbell's tabloid technique, has adopted it - some would even say, has refined it - while Mr George Bush takes more faltering steps in the same direction, when he can manage to remember the words that have been written for him to utter.

Mr Blair does not have a philosophical turn of mind. Few prime ministers have possessed one. The only recent exceptions that one can think of have been Lord Salisbury and A J Balfour. If you asked Mr Blair what the difference was, for example, between freedom and democracy, and whether there could be a conflict between them, the Prime Minister would stand back astonished.

You might then postulate 10 people wrecked on a desert island. By a majority of six to four, they agreed that all should have to wear white shirts on a Sunday, the required water being readily available. That was democracy. However, the four dissidents - even the one dissident - insisted on wearing any old shirt on any day. That was freedom.

Mr Blair, in his "Forces of Conservatism" speech in Bournemouth, described this as "mad libertarianism". But libertarianism or liberty, Mr Blair has always handled the commodity with the deepest suspicion, as have most of his ministers over the years. Mr Jack Straw is among the exceptions, which may surprise you at first sight, but his record is rather better than it seems.

Similarly, Mr Straw as foreign secretary proved more open-minded about the Arab world than Mr Blair (even though Mr Straw is himself partly Jewish). The story goes, which I have been unable to verify, that Mr Blair had Mr Straw removed on the suggestion or, it may be, the insistence of the United States, only to be replaced by that former tricoteuse of the Tribune Group, Mrs Margaret Beckett.

Mrs Beckett is not, I would imagine, quite Mr Blair's mug of tea, despite the undoubtedly long service and recent good conduct on her part. She is still capable of trouble. So is Mr Peter Hain. He represents Neath in West Wales. I do not want to press a rugby analogy - which many readers would not understand - but in that part of the world there was a type of player, a forward, who was given what was called a licence to roam.

It was exactly the same with Mr Hain. He too was given a licence to roam. It was to question the wisdom of the mighty, so encouraging the backbenchers and mollifying the constituencies; while all the time remaining in the Government and, to a certain extent, retaining his place on the Central Committee, even if it was a fairly lowly one. That, indeed, was Mr Hain's utility, his allotted position in the scheme of things.

But the cigarette can set fire to the rubbish; the electrical fault cause the television to go up in flames and so burn down the house; or the lightning conductor change places with the lightning itself. It is an error to suppose that foreign affairs play no part in domestic politics.

H H Asquith was brought down by a combination of bridge, women and champagne, and his inability to prosecute the First World War. David Lloyd George, who succeeded him, had no interest in bridge or champagne but was highly interested in women who, however, did nothing to impede his early career.

He was brought down, rather, by the conflict between Greece and Turkey in the aftermath of the great war. Lloyd George backed Greece, equating it with Wales. In much the same way did Welsh politicians of a later era (though not always this present era) recall the tabernacles of their youth - Moriah, Bethesda, Caersalem, Bethany, Sardis - and give their sentimental support and approval to the state of Israel. Lloyd George, however, was brought down by the Conservatives who mainly supported Turkey, so bringing to an end the Coalition of 1916-22.

Neville Chamberlain lost office in 1940 because of the disasters of the Norway campaign, in which the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, was equally (and, arguably, even more heavily) implicated. But Churchill rode his luck. Anthony Eden had to go because of Suez, of which we have heard quite enough recently.

Oddly enough, we have not heard nearly so much about the fall of Margaret Thatcher. And yet, the causes were plain. There was the poll tax, which caused her backbenchers to desert her. There was Europe, which lost her the support of senior ministers, notably of Sir Geoffrey Howe, and of Michael Heseltine, who had resigned before that. And there was her going off her head.

She said, on her removal from office: "I'm a good back-seat driver." She was not referring to her successor John Major but to the then US President, George Bush Snr. This conflict caused little trouble with the country, with her party or with the Labour Party. Mr Blair's troubles are different.

I observed earlier that he is not at all a philosophical man. What he is, rather, is a religious man. Indeed, he causes offence to devout Roman Catholics by taking Holy Communion when he has no business to do so. But that is a minor failing. What is dangerous is that he knows Good and knows Evil, or thinks that he does. He may even be a little touched in the head.

I hope to drop in to the Liberal Democrat conference at Brighton for a day or so. It is still a fine town, though not what it was when I first visited it 47 years ago. Nothing, certainly not yet another speech from the Prime Minister (I am assuming he is still prime minister), would persuade me to visit Manchester for the Labour Conference. I would prefer to spend the best part of a week in Sodom, Gomorrah or even Blackpool.