NEW ZEALAND: Thanks for all your comments. I do read them, you know, even when I'm on my travels. Earlier today Matthew Hill wrote this about the speculation Tony Blair is contending with:
What is wrong with journalists, don't they like any suprises at all? I bet they all spoilt Christmas for themselves by looking for their presents. Blair's already indicated he will stay until pretty-much-the-end of his term; that's quite a long time away! Why isn't that enough information?
The answer's simple - it's because no-one in Westminster believed he meant to serve a full term and a growing number in his own party don't want him to. The events of recent weeks have highlighted that the question of when he stands down might not be for him alone to answer .
AUSTRALIA: Thus Tony Blair tried to put a stop to the questions about his departure from Number Ten. "We've had enough of those questions," he told me this morning at his news conference with the Australian Prime Minister John Howard.
It was, though, his answers to those questions when asked by Australian interviewers that kicked this story off.
First, he was asked whether it was a "strategic mistake" to have signalled in advance his departure. "Maybe that was a mistake," he said, although Downing Street insists that that wasn't really what he meant and that he would have made that clear if he hadn't been interrupted.
Today on breakfast telly he agreed that politicians have an expiry date and then said that they liked to keep that date to themselves.
His aides are infuriated by this and complain that we in the travelling press corps have gone stir crazy after too long in the air. There is clearly a danger that this appears to be a semantic row fuelled by journalists obsessed with anticipating which precise day Tony Blair will step down. Yet I believe this story does matter.
Tony Blair has now effectively accepted in public what many of his closest allies have told him in private - that his announcement before the last election that it would be his last as leader has backfired. Far from stilling speculation about his future as was hoped, it has fuelled it.
What matters now is that the prime minister is painfully aware that less than a year after being re-elected there is a lively debate about how long he can and should stay in office. He has told aides that he already has a timetable for his departure in mind - he's not revealing what it is, beyond making clear it's not imminent. What is clear is that he is now determined to stay around long enough to see through reforms to the NHS, education and, having changed his mind, the House of Lords too.
At the same time he knows that he must reassure his party that the transition from a Blair to a Brown premiership will be orderly. His difficulty is finding a way to counter the story being told by his enemies - the story of a man clinging to office.
PS
The reason Aussie journalists posed so many questions re Blair's retirement was not to do their Pommie colleagues a favour. Their PM John Howard originally said he'd retire when he was 64 and on his third term. He is now 66, in his fourth term and unless he announces a change of mind soon or the polls change, he's headed for a fifth.
