Normal service will now resume after the Labour party conference failed to claim the Prime Minister's scalp (surprise, surprise). Even before The Speech on Tuesday, delegates had clearly decided to pull back from the abyss into which the media were cheerfully inviting them to leap, and allow Tony Blair to survive the week with his shamelessly stage-managed ovations.

Actually, his Olympic-standard emoting camouflaged some admirably tough talking as he stuck to his guns over Iraq and told his party to grow up a bit. But his problems haven't gone away. Iraq and Hutton apart, his biggest headaches -- over the state of the public services, crime and illegal immigration -- arise from failing to face up honestly to the difficult choices that have to be made, and then ruthlessly enforcing that incoherence from the top.

The real problem is that this is a government of tyros, who couldn't run a whelk-stall but think that idealism and 'Fuhrerprinzip' make the trains run on time. Well, now a particular idealistic chicken has come home to roost. Mr Justice Munby's ruling that NHS patients left stranded on the waiting lists have a right to go abroad for surgery and send the bill to the NHS threatens to open the floodgates -- and all because we are bound by a European law that says so, part of that European project which takes away the ability to govern of a Prime Minister who is desperate that it should do so.