Postcards from the edge

Wish you were here, Mr Blair? Last night's draft UN resolution on Lebanon is a 'first step', says the PM, who delayed his holiday to secure it. But as he heads for the beach, a Middle East ceasefire remains a long way off, and the death toll rises daily in Iraq and Afghanistan. Francis Elliott and Raymond Whitaker consider his position as our reporters on the ground offer him some grim holiday reading

It is an emptier Downing Street than usual. Many staff, anticipating that Tony Blair would be on holiday, are themselves on leave. Indeed, most of Mr Blair's family are waiting for him in the Caribbean, leaving even the Prime Minister's private quarters strangely silent. He will have heard all the more clearly, then, the shouts and chants of yesterday's demonstration against his handling of the Lebanon crisis.

Mr Blair's decision to delay his holiday in Barbados was, say senior Downing Street officials, because "he didn't want to spend nine hours incommunicado". The implication, that the weeks of telephone diplomacy are reaching a particularly critical phase, helps smooth the embarrassment of the holiday U-turn. The emergence of a draft UN resolution last night appeared to vindicate Mr Blair's decision to put off his vacation. But even he admitted the draft was only a "first step" and questions over his handling of the Lebanon crisis and wider analysis of the causes that underlie it remain as acute as ever.

The poignant mound of children's shoes beneath the Cenotaph provides, for many, a far more eloquent commentary on the week's events than Mr Blair's equivocations. For yesterday's demo ended a week that began with the world waking to the horrors of Qana. The Prime Minister, on a tour of California, was asked for his reaction as he left his San Francisco hotel to go to church. Later, when he returned, he said the deaths of at least 34 children in the basement flattened by an Israel air strike showed the "situation must stop". But still there was no call for an immediate ceasefire from the British Prime Minister, nor any suggestion that Israel might be using a disproportionate degree of force. Later that day, in a speech to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp executives down the Californian coast in the luxury resort of Pebble Beach, Mr Blair laid the blame for the conflict firmly at the feet of Hizbollah. Two days later, before an audience of Los Angeles burghers, Mr Blair spelt out his latest foreign policy thinking. It was an extraordinary speech. Admitting Britain and the US were not winning the war on terror, at least in the short term, he called for a "complete renaissance" of the strategy and a recognition that military force alone would never prevail. There was his familiar exhortation that the Middle East peace process be pursued with renewed vigour, and a gentle rebuke to the US for failing to do more on world trade and climate change.

But he also sketched a world-view that many commentators found puzzlingt. "There is an arc of extremism now stretching across the Middle East and touching, with increasing definition, countries far outside that region," he said. He divided the Islamic world neatly between "moderate mainstream" and "reactionary", lumping together in the second category al-Qaida and the Taliban with the secular government of Syria and that of Iran.

Mr Blair also stated: "There is a host of analyses written about mistakes made in Iraq M and Afghanistan, much of it W made with hindsight, but some with justification. But it all misses one vital point. The moment we decided not to change regime but to change the value system, we made Iraq and Afghanistan into existential battles for reactionary Islam." The conflicts "widened the definition of reactionary Islam", uniting previous enemies against the threat posed by democracy. To empower moderate Muslims against this new alliance of extremism would require removing all sources of legitimate complaint against the West, starting with Palestine, said the Prime Minister. It was Mr Blair at his most messianic, albeit tinged with recognition of mistakes made. The speech had been largely written before the events of Lebanon, but Mr Blair's aides say the crisis only added definition to his words. Many in the Labour Party, including some in the Cabinet, think Mr Blair's position is vainglorious at best.

They wonder, with Jack Straw, why he cannot condemn Israel's tactics, and they fret privately that he will add achieving peace in the Middle East to his lengthening list of "must-dos" before leaving office. But if the Prime Minister does imagine he has such a role to play, a fellow Briton, Mark Malloch Brown, sought to disillusion him.

Mr Malloch Brown, the UN Deputy Secretary General, suggested after the Los Angeles speech that Britain's involvement in Iraq precluded it from having a public role in the Middle East negotiations. Mr Blair began his address last week with a reference to the previous day hen British soldiers were killed Iraq and Afghanistan. His audience in California would have been this as a reminder that America had at least one steady - ally in both conflicts, but those opposed to US policy would have viewed it differently.