Canny Blunkett moves a step closer to No 10

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When he left the state boarding school for the blind, his teachers told him that he should not aspire to grow up into anything grander than a lathe operator or a piano tuner. When he fought for selection as a Labour candidate, members of the local party asked how he could possibly cope as an MP. When he began to canvass his ambition to become Home Secretary, some civil servants quietly wondered whether he could manage the most paper-intensive job in the Cabinet. Now an increasing number of people ask: are we looking at Britain's first blind Prime Minister?

You will get a response from David Blunkett which is characteristically deft. He is unsure, he says, that the country will be ready for a blind leader in his political lifetime. Thus the ambition is simultaneously advertised and deprecated without making himself sound either overweeningly arrogant or dissemblingly faux modest. No wonder an admiring Tony Blair has been heard to say to intimates at Number 10: "David Blunkett is a very canny politician."

His performance in the Commons yesterday was a virtuoso display of that shrewdness. In a deftly executed U-turn, he managed to ditch Jack Straw's failed approach towards asylumseekers without rubbishing his predecessor. At the same time, he attracted congratulations from the Labour, Tory and Liberal benches alike. This is a further illustration that he is the only member of the Cabinet to have palpably grown in stature since the election. While other ministers have floundered in old problems or stumbled over their new responsibilities, David Blunkett has demonstrated that he has a grip on his agenda allied to the determination and guile to push it forward.

His stature has been further enhanced in the wake of the atrocities in America. The greatest part of that limelight left over from President Blair has been consumed by Mr Blunkett as the senior Cabinet officer in charge of the home guard.

He now denies that he ever said: "I will make Jack look like a liberal." But the quote does have the ring of Mr Blunkett's dry and provocative humour. And the idea that he would make Maximum Jack look like a handwringing bleeding heart recommended him to Number 10. It has also served him usefully since. Liberal opinion has been relieved to find that the Blunkett Home Office is less reactionary and more flexible than they feared. A man contemptuous of political correctness who can never be characterised as limp-wristed is also insulated from attack by the reactionary tabloids.

None of which actually makes him a liberal. He did not decide to effectively decriminalise cannabis because he wanted to be the pinup of skankheads. While his university contemporaries were getting stoned to rock music, the student Blunkett spent his nights hunched over a Braille typewriter transcribing tapes of lectures.

He has been quick to stamp on suggestions that there should be a relaxation of the law's treatment of ecstasy. Drug users are not soul mates of a man who has no grasp of the concept of chilling out, if he even knows what the word means. Even by the standards of senior politicians, he is a chronic workaholic. Though divorced for 14 years, he still wears his wedding ring as a signal that he has no spare time or energy for girlfriends.

He decided to act on cannabis for the typically practical reason that the law was being made an ass and trying to apply it was consuming police resources better devoted to tackling serious crime. There is probably no other member of the Cabinet who applies the doctrine of "what works" with such ruthless pragmatism as the Home Secretary.

This is likewise true about the new measures on asylum seekers, his second major reversal of his predecessor's policies in the space of less than a week. It had a bearing on his calculations that the voucher system stigmatised and demeaned refugees. The main driver was practicality. As their critics always predicted, vouchers have proved to be expensive, no deterrent against illegal immigration and a honeypot for fraudsters.

The curtailment of the right to appeal against deportation will be tougher than the regime imposed by Jack Straw. The threat to terminate benefits to asylum seekers who don't attend his new induction and accommodation centres is typical Blunkett: take the carrot or feel the stick.

In the balance between rights and responsibilities, he puts much the greater stress on the second half of the equation. His response to the terrorist threat has exposed the authoritarian streak. He wants to make it easier to hold suspects without-trial and to backdate penalties for anthrax hoaxers to well before parliament will have legislated for them. To him, the constitutional arguments against retrospective law-making are effete legalistic quibbling.

Cherie Booth, a QC who is married to someone quite senior in the Government, is among the human rights lawyers who don't like the sound of a lot of that. Which won't do the Home Secretary harm in the eyes of Number 10. Tony Blair is more of a Blunkettite than he is a Boothite when it comes to civil liberties. Anyway, Cherie herself is usually a member of the fan club. She attended the launch when he recently published a book of Blunkettism. Though its sales are unlikely to trouble JK Rowling, as tracts by serving ministers go, it is a stimulating and rewarding read.

So are we looking at the next Prime Minister? This is not a question Gordon Brown will like to hear asked. It's not a thought David Blunkett should want to promote. To be tipped for the very top is invariably not a blessing. It is a curse, which attracts the enmity of other ambitious colleagues. That the question is nevertheless asked, and by a growing number of people, is a vast compliment to the blind boy who was once told he should consider himself to be lucky to hold a tuning fork.

? Andrew Rawnsley is chief political commentator of The Observer.