The Sketch: Simon Carr

Silence greets the returning conqueror. Is this how it will end for Blair?

It was quiet on the backbenches. Too quiet. The record-breaking Prime Minister rose for his first question time since the election. Some thanks mightn't have been out of place, perhaps? Some modest triumphalism, was that too much to ask for? Broadly speaking, it was.

It was our first glimpse of prime ministerial isolation this session. A glint of how his career will end, whenever it does, with friends, enemies and opponents watching from behind the perimeter fence. No one in grappling distance; no one on whom he might exercise his astonishing willpower.

Old Labour archaeologists, parliamentary activists, sacked ministers, insulted chairwomen, dropped favourites, there they sat. Arms folded and sporting unnecessarily red ties and tops. No wonder the Tories called out: "Look behind you!"

It's the one weakness of the political centre. You can be attacked from the left, from the right and from Andrew McKinlay on the side. Mr McKinlay, who sits next to Dennis Skinner (an error of taste rather than judgement), fizzes and pops like corn in a hot pan. "More!" cried the Tories, after his ferocious condemnation of croneyism in the people's peerages (one of the more substantial achievements of the last government, you may remember).

But the silences were worse, and more telling, than the noise.

Martin Salter demanded that the Prime Minister never tolerate the complacency and incompetence of a management like Railtrack and that these vile privatisation practices never be applied to any other public institution.

It's unclear why the Government is so rude about the Tory privatisation of Railtrack when it is adapting it for the Tube. The distinction, Mr Blair said, lay in working better with the private sector rather than breaking things up.

In another brilliant parliamentary performance, William Hague again showed why he was incapable of leading his party to victory. He repeatedly ran the Prime Minister through and yet drew no blood. Maybe there is no blood to draw.

He asked whether the brilliant new surgical units, the source of so much Labour unease were to be private or public surgical units.

"The management will be private but the surgical units themselves will be in the public sector," Mr Blair equivocated. How the Tories cheered. How Labour squirmed.

Charles Kennedy asked for an absolute guarantee that Railtrack's deficiencies wouldn't be imported into schools and hospitals.

It was a chance for Mr Blair to give any number of absolute guarantees: "I pledge. As I stand here today. No child, not one single child will ever be crushed by a thousand tonnes of rolling stock during assembly. Not on my watch! No surgeon! Will ever perform! A triple bypass while falling-down drunk! Or if they do operate drunk they won't pass out in the chest cavity.

"Or if they do pass out in a chest cavity, colleagues will pull them out before the patient bled to death as would happen under £20bn of Tory cuts! That I guarantee!"

Elfyn Llwyd inquired after the sort of ethical criteria that companies might need if they wanted to invest in schools. You might remember an episode of The Simpsons in which Springfield High got sponsored. The maths lesson held this exchange: "If you have six Pepsis and drink two Pepsis, how many Pepsis do you have left?"

"Er, Pepsi?"

"Partial credit!"

The faith of New Labour in private-sector management is so complete, it can only be because they've been in politics all their lives.