Steve Richards: Mr Blair's war on complacency is over. Why? Because he's complacent

One of Tony Blair's more under-reported wars is the one he declared on the day he became leader. He told his troops in 1994 that he would always fight a war against complacency. Neither he nor his party would take anything for granted. In the past he has stuck to this pledge to the point of comical rigidity. Even at the last election he was fighting the war, warning his supporters that they could still lose. Now, for the first time in seven and a half years, he is no longer battling with the same discipline. There are signs that the Prime Minister is becoming complacent.

The state of the railways is commanding much attention, but the trains have been terrible ever since Mr Blair came to power in 1997. He has been recklessly neglectful about them all along. The developments that have made the system storm on to the front pages in recent days are largely irrelevant. The industrial action will be resolved before very long, and will not spread across the network. It is a red herring.

The Prime Minister's trip to India, Pakistan and Afghanistan is another red herring. We would all be laughing – or travelling – if the crisis in the railways could have been solved by Mr Blair spending the New Year in Britain. The crisis is much deeper and more serious. If he had spent a month in Ibiza it would have made no significant difference to the appalling plight of the railways.

There is only one tenuous connection. Foreigners who visit this country experience our public transport at first hand. They find it laughable that Britain presents itself as the pivotal world power in every international crisis when they cannot catch a train from Moorgate to Finsbury Park without going through a similar experience to climbing Everest. Britain's image abroad is defined more by the state of its public transport than by photos of Mr Blair standing shoulder to shoulder with President George Bush.

Given the number of red herrings on the line ,this column will return to the railways after a diversion. The other sign of complacency is more pertinent because it is entirely of the Government's own making. Mr Blair's approach to the reforms of the House of Lords is more shambolic than has previously been reported. As we know, the proposals, that include only a small elected proportion, were cobbled together by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine. He refuses to defend them in public, although he gave an inept performance in private to Labour MPs last week.

The defence in the media often comes from the Leader of the House, Lord Williams, one of the Prime Minister's more inspired appointments. Privately Lord Williams despairs of the proposals, believing them to be a dog's breakfast. He wants to see a wholly elected second chamber. So the author of the proposals never defends them on the media, while a minister who privately opposes them puts the case on Lord Irvine's behalf.

Not that Lord Irvine acted entirely out of personal conviction himself. He tried to carry out what he considered to be Mr Blair's wishes. But here is the twist. The Prime Minister is not especially interested in the whole damned thing. Indeed, he has never been especially interested in the whole damned thing.

It is being reported that the Government is considering making concessions. Perhaps it will. But a fuming Prime Minsiter is going around in private saying that he is tempted to scrap any further attempt at reform and leave matters as they are. There was a hint of this in the Commons last week when he said that virtually every MP and Peer had a different set of proposals for the upper chamber. Mr Blair is bored with it all. He cannot be bothered.

This is where he is ceasing to fight his war on complacency. As I wrote in The Independent on Thursday, I detect some signs of life in the Conservative Party. They are only the occasional wheeze, but that is progress from what appeared to be a corpse. What the Conservatives lack is any sort of credible narrative. The Prime Minister could give them one. Without much contortion, the Conservatives could present themselves as the champions of the people against an over-mighty government. There would be no more effective symbolic proposal for the Conservatives than to propose a more democratic second chamber. Of course, it would be cynical, coming from a party that defended the hereditary principle and who benefited from an inbuilt majority in the Lords for decades. But they could argue they had learnt from the mistakes of the past, a theme adopted to brilliant effect by Mr Blair when he was in opposition.

The Prime Minister's seething indifference to Lords' reform reflects a wider apathy towards the constitutional agenda. He has never attempted to make a coherent case for the wider reforms – devolution, changes in the Lords, the possibility of regional government. I was reminded of this as I read the latest pamphlet from his political guru, Anthony Giddens. Published by the Fabian Society, Giddens's s pamphlet argues that there is no alternative to his Third Way, the route that Mr Blair has more or less taken since becoming leader. Prof Giddens highlights the importance of devolution, but he never explains why he considers it to be important. For that matter, the Prime Minister has never explained why either.

Prof Giddens also inadvertently shows why Labour made such a mess of the railways in the first term. In the same way that he makes no sense of the politician's role at a local or regional level, he offers no insight into how an active state can intervene to save public services. Instead, he stresses the importance of low taxes and governments keeping in touch with public opinion. In Mr Blair's first term the low taxes meant that there was no cash available for investment in the railways; and the focus groups, to which he paid an obsessive attention, suggested that public transport was not a high priority. The Third Way does not allow for political leaders to leap ahead of public opinion and anticipate a public crisis . It provides no route map, even though John Prescott was screaming that the privatised railways were a "national disgrace".

Even now, I wonder if Mr Blair realises quite how bad it is on the railways or on the London Underground. The Tories are not sleeping any more. Some of them are waking up. The Prime Minister is ending his war on complacency just when he might have a battle on his hands.