The Sketch: From action hero to Thunderbird puppet without strings

It was the Prime Minister's monthly. He looked a bit funny. Patchy colour with shiny bits. The upper lip was as stiff as a stiff upper lip. It was so stiff I was thinking Botox. It was the upper lip of a Thunderbird puppet.

And his voice was odd too, faltering with a stop-start effect as if he hadn't got his lines off properly. My voice does that after a cubic foot of thin white wine and four hours' sleep. He must be under terrific pressure, doing something as unpopular as top-up fees without George Bush to back him up.

I don't think we've seen him quite like this before, speaking so out of his current character. It may just be that he's very, very tired, getting in the 25 swing-rebels to show them his passionate commitment to the best interests of this country and its universities and its vulnerable students and lecturers and poorer parents and middle-income parents and graduates and workers and employers and modernising MPs and, of course, its cobblers.

Future, sorry, its future.

To this end, he told the press conference that graduates were currently repaying their loans at the rate of £17 a week. Under the new proposals they would be repaying £8.50 a week. And yet (it's magic) the new scheme will provide a 30 per cent increase in student funding. It's like advertisements on The Simpsons - the candy that cleans and straightens your teeth! Elinor Goodman asked him why Gordon Brown was against rolling up fee remission into the maintenance package (we were taking the policy more seriously than Mr Blair had anticipated). "I don't think he is. I think it's the other way round," he said. "Whichever way it was reported in the papers isn't correct," he added. Everyone laughed, and not in a very nice way.

He does make the case, though. He may be very, very tired but he is also very, very impressive. He must be bewildered why it isn't working as it should. He's offering big hand-outs to everyone. To us in the middle class he's offering hard cash to get those locusts and bloodsuckers we know as our children out of the house and off our hands five years early. Students pay less, poor students pay hardly anything. Universities get an extra billion a year.

Mind you, as the Daily Mirror pointed out, the universities needed an extra £11bn - where was the missing £10bn coming from? We could argue about that later, Mr Blair said. Oh really? When, exactly? So Nick Robinson asked him quite baldly: "Will Gordon Brown make a good prime minister?" The PM swore, slightly. We haven't heard that before. "For God's sake, Nick!" he said. It may be nothing. It may be not nothing.

As for Hutton, he was mum. But Adam Boulton's question deserves an answer. Will we be allowed pre-publication copies of the judgment so we can make our own minds up before being spun by Downing Street? It is, Mr Blair says, entirely up to the judge. However, it is, the judge says, entirely up to Mr Blair.

simoncarr75@hotmail.com