With most of Mrs Thatcher's reforms there were immediate gains, at least for some The acute problems came later. In contrast, this Government is reversing decades of underfunding in public services and seeking to address some of the complacent conservatism that accompanied the decline. Often this means short-term pain to bring about some longer-term gains: tax increases, giving power to councils that have had no recent experience in exercising it, charging to drive on roads.The document that accompanied the launch of the "Conversation" poses genuinely difficult questions. Implicit in some of them is the daunting conundrum that has been at the heart of recent Blair/Brown tensions: how to devolve power in public services when the Government is responsible for raising taxes to pay for them? Other questions raise equally thorny issues, suggesting that the Government is moving towards support for compulsory pensions, more congestion charging and motorway tolls. Here is an example of how a mature political debate could work. The director general of the CBI, Digby Jones, rightly complains at the appalling state of transport in Britain He moans also about the tax burden.

So, if he does not want to pay more tax, how to deal with the transport crisis? Before long a consensus might emerge in favour of far more extensive charging. Tony Blair would have no choice but to be bold on behalf of a public screaming to pay for better transport.Whether the "conversation" will proceed in quite such a convivial way is another matter. The Government is trying to renew itself at a time when the goodwill of the early years has evaporated and when Mr Blair faces a credible Tory leader for the first time. Although the Tories lack credible policies, I predict that they will be 10 points ahead by the spring. The Conversation should have happened early in the rosy first term when ministers tended to avoid "hard choices" while claiming a prime ministerial visit to a council estate was a welfare revolution. Now Hutton hovers, Iraq implodes and Michael Howard is getting an easy ride.

The easily mocked Big Conversation is a project that deserves to succeed, but many other noisy voices will get in its way More from Steve Richards. In the abstract, Mr Tony Blair is undoubtedly likeable. He has most of the appurtenances of likeability in the early 21st century: tall, slim - now verging on the haggard - with a wide smile, lots of teeth and high cheekbones. Whatever his true state of health (a matter on which No 10 is understandably reticent), he is manifestly a person of great energy, now getting into aeroplanes, now getting out of them In the abstract, Mr Tony Blair is undoubtedly likeable. But he gives the impression of still, after six years, enjoying the whole performance.He has not acquired the carapace of pomposity which is such a useful protection to those holding public office. He is still the same Mr Blair that we have always known: or, at any rate, the act is still the same: "Hi, I'm Tony, a pretty straight sort of guy. Trust me." Perhaps people no longer do, or not to the same extent.

But the lack of public trust has not so far been consistently reflected in voting intentions as expressed by the opinion polls. According to those same polls, he remains the sort of person that their respondents would like to have as their friend God help us all!But there is a Blair paradox. It is that, likeable as he may be, he is not very much liked, and never has been, not even in those days before he had acquired his present reputation for twisting and turning. It is like an Oxford Philosophy question of the 1950s: "Blair is likeable but not liked.