IN Newton Aycliffe nine years ago, I achieved something I am unlikely to repeat, a 20-minute conversation with Tony Blair on election night.

I was a trainee reporter with The Northern Echo. The man who then was just plain MP for Sedgefield was a rising star and personal favourite of Neil Kinnock.

I will be back at Newton Aycliffe Leisure Centre tonight for the Sedgefield declaration, this time as a political correspondent for Sky News and with no hope of button-holing Mr Blair.

Having covered 6,000 miles over the past three-and-a-half weeks trailing his battlebus, I have, at least, seen the Prime Minister at close quarters during this often staid campaign.

Avoiding an attachment to Mr Blair and his entourage has been a test of journalistic mettle. In fact, we've developed a relationship rather like the one a hostage develops with his captors.

It is hard not to be impressed by his adroit handling of questions, the lawyer's ability to turn every hostile inquiry into an attack on the Tories. It is hard to be unimpressed by his energy levels and his quick wit (even if some of the gags are endlessly recycled).

It is even hard to see how the relative newly-wedded William Hague can compete with Mr Blair, father-of-four, often with 17-year-old son Euan in tow.

And then there is Cherie. Whatever else this campaign has taught us, it ought to be remembered as the moment we learned to love the PM's wife.

Relentless pilloried, cruelly caricatured for her dress sense, her figure, her grin, even her alleged Lady Macbeth instincts, she has, in reality, been the star of the show.

Having watched the Blairs work a room, a hospital ward, a Labour club, a sixth form refectory, and countless other televised opportunities to meet the people, it cannot fail to dawn on careful observers that Cherie has been unfairly maligned.

Where Tony is awkward, she is natural. Where he struggles with small talk, she potters at ease. Tony, ultimately a public schoolboy for all his estuary English affectations, lacks the common touch his Liverpudlian wife has in spades.

And for Cherie, this campaign has been fun. From the first moment she stepped off the battlebus and signed her name with an X on the bare chest of a young man in Kent, Mrs Blair has endowed her husband's appearances with unexpected flashes of colour. In Nottingham, she led pensioners in a rendition of Roll Out the Barrel, in Trimdon, she pulled out her own camera to snap the photographers.

In Brighton, she delivered what, for me at least, was one of the campaign's seminal images. She and Mr Blair were aboard a double-decker bus touring the sea-front. They were tail-gating a coach laden with photographers. The Prime Minister, keen not to be pictured on what could be depicted as a victory parade with all the electorally unhelpful echoes of Kinnock-like triumphalism, remained down the back of his bus away from the lenses (though as least one cameraman succeeded in capturing his hair in windswept Mohican mode).

Cherie, by contrast, was standing on the open top deck, hanging on to the front rail, waving furiously and grinning wildly.

Leaders' spouses may take their vows of silence for the campaign but, once again, her actions spoke loudly. Whatever her husband might say to the contrary, fearful of apathy and a foregone conclusion, her expression said, quite vividly, that it's in the bag.