The opinions expressed by John Blunt are not necessarily those of this newspaper

WELL, at last the penny has dropped with Tony Blair - that you cannot carry on fleecing and hounding motorists without an eventual backfire from those who are voters.

This week he is reported to have put the brake on his deputy John Prescott's plans to levy congestion charges on rush-hour drivers and getting set to stall the Chancellor's above-inflation increases that have rocketed petrol prices year on year.

And he is portrayed as an on-the-ball smart cookie with his finger on the infuriated drivers' pulse.

"The Prime Minister has great instincts for these things and has picked up the danger signals about the government and drivers," a ministerial source was quoted as saying.

Piffle! If it has taken until now for him to get the message, he must have been going about in his official limousine all this time with the blinds pulled down and the stereo on full blast.

If in-touch Tony really wants to know how long this volcano of anger has been building up, I will quite gladly send him some back numbers of this column's fulminations on the years of physical and financial persecution of car owners by both national and local government.

But this is not some sudden blinding conversion to reality on his part, triggered by the barrage of criticism over his limo sneaking into Mr Prescott's new jams-inducing buses-only lane on the M4 while the tax-paying hoi-polloi fumed at a standstill in their vehicles. Rather it is an overdue realisation that he cannot play the dictator any more - thanks to him being knocked off his pedestal in the Euro elections.

Not so cocksure now, Tony is at last addressing the anger he has arrogantly ignored before.

He is nervously looking at opinion polls showing that only 20 per cent of drivers believe Labour is the party to best represent motorists compared with 60 per cent for the Tories.

If the Prime Minister really has great instincts for these things, he will realise that William Hague will seize on Labour's anti-car mania just as he did with its desire to ditch the pound and run right over it.

The only way he can counter this is if he has the gumption to end the immoral robbery that takes £32 billion in road taxes and puts just £5.6 billion back into roads and which lets Gordon Brown siphon off 82 per cent of the £3.18 price of a gallon of petrol.

And if he is even wiser he will stop the plans for car parking taxes and road tolls, bring a halt to the ludicrous traffic-calming plague and sack John Prescott for insisting this week that the extra revenue extracted for all this will go not on improving the roads, but on buses and trains that 30 million motorists would rather not use.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.