The Sketch: Reform, he said, is a word with no meaning. It wasn't alone

And suddenly he was there. The essence of oratory is surprise, and on crucial occasions, Tony Blair finds the way to surprise us.

Yesterday, he didn't enter the hall, he emerged into it. He combined humility and certainty in a most original way. He walked extremely slowly and gazed, yogically.

When alerted to the audience's presence (they were applauding) he started from his meditation. What? Me? No, are you sure it's me you are applauding?

And from that moment he had them. And he wouldn't let them go. Charm, change of pace, great themes, personal glimpses, some jokes. The man who flashed him a big fat V-sign from his car – "It could have been anyone," he said. "It could have been my father-in-law."

Enormous laughter, not least from Tony Booth who happened to be sitting in front of me. The Unison officials around him rocked, pointed, poked him and entirely forgot they were there to denounce the creeping privatisation of public services. They seemed not to be able to hear that schools were to be managed now by the hated headmasters, and piece-work was to be introduced for surgeons. That's how brilliant he was.

Criticism was equated with pessimism and pessimism was equated with the Tories. To criticise the Government was to align oneself with the mass-murdering adulterers of the treason-mongering party.

At the end of the speech the prime ministerial creature went into yet another mode. He had communed. He gazed up at the distant towers of Jerusalem shining in the sunlit uplands and then gave his audience the full effect of his overpowering submissiveness. It killed.

It's hard to jeer at a speech like that, but that's not to say we shouldn't try.

"Influence is power is prosperity." Influence is prosperity, then? What economic textbook this came out of is hard to know, unless it was the one co-authored by Richard Desmond, Bernie Ecclestone, Lakshmi Mittal and PowderJect.

No, it was almost as vacuous as his most revealing thought for the day: "Reform is a word," he said. "It has no meaning in itself." Quite. So very like all the other words in his political vocabulary. Fairness. Justice.

Poverty. Trains. Five. They have no meaning in themselves, they mean only what he wants them to mean. What else? The imperial temptations are not always resisted: "Our values aren't Western values. They're human values, and anywhere, anytime people are given the chance, they embrace them." Tell that, if can get anywhere near them, to the Yanomami. The Bushmen aren't that keen on them either. Nor are the Tories.

But on those occasions when you could check his claims against reality, he was found wanting. "We should value our public servants" for instance. The one thing that public servants overwhelmingly feel is that they aren't valued by their political masters. The street crime initiative – has it led to a crime reduction? It has led to an increase in crime outside the initiative. If our education system is so good, where do our seven million illiterates come from? That's Tory pessimism.

But then he is still one of the better Tory prime ministers. And on the strength of that speech, will be for a very long time to come.

simoncarr75@hotmail.com