WORDS can be tricky beasts. Here is a statement that might have another meaning altogether: "He has our full confidence." Tony Blair is speaking about Stephen Byers, the Transport Secretary.

Imagine for a moment that you are Mr Byers. Do you feel a flood of relief on hearing this expression of support - or do you panic like mad, glance nervously at the splintered plank on which you are standing and edge forward towards the blunt, twanging end from which there is no return, unless you count a bracing swim with the sharks circling below?

"He has our full confidence" are words which might mean what they say. So why is there a suggestion of The Sopranos about them, with Teflon Tony Soprano uttering this chillingly diplomatic phrase just as he arranges for a fat hit-man with see-through socks (or at the very least a reshuffle)?

The Prime Minister has been manning the barricades in defence of Mr Byers, who is charged with manipulation and deceit. The alleged crimes of the Transport Secretary don't amount to much and can be traced to September 11 and Jo Moore's "bury bad news" e-mail. If he'd sacked the silly woman then, he would almost certainly have escaped the present fuss.

Instead, Mr Byers has become involved in an internecine squabble in his own department, which saw the resignation of both Jo Moore and his departmental press chief, Martin Sixsmith. Only Mr Sixsmith later said he hadn't resigned at all, Mr Byers said he had, and Sir Richard Mottram, permanent secretary to the Transport Department, stepped in to support Mr Byers. At which point aspirins are called for.

The trouble with trying to write about this matter is that you quickly lose your way. The details come flying at you like small flies sticking to a car windscreen. And soon, all vision is blocked by black dots and you can't see a wretched thing.

If the double-edged expression of support is one tradition of the political fox hunt, the call to resign is another. Oppositions always cry resign when they smell blood, merely because that's what Oppositions do. It's the easy part of not being in Government, as simple as dragging the word "untenable" out of the dusty dictionary of political displeasure. Newspapers do it too, because that's what newspapers do.

Plenty of newspapers, this one included, have called on Mr Byers to step down. He does, after all, make a good target, seeming mighty imperious and being New Labour to his socks. Also, transport in this country is in a mess, from the clogged roads to the late-arriving trains, and all we hear about is the sour back-biting within Mr Byers's department, which hardly inspires confidence.

And yet there is a case to be made for his survival. Look, this isn't going to be easy but I'll have a go. The problem with the blood-letting, "resign-resign" culture is that no one looks to the future, being too taken up with the sport of the moment. The troubled transport department, with its ever-spinning revolving door, needs a minister to stay in control for long enough to make a difference. Hounding out Byers might lead to a satisfying splash but it won't make the trains run on time.

The trouble with this argument is that Stephen Byers has yet to prove he can run a department or inspire confidence in his staff. He survived on Tuesday but he's sure to go sooner or later, reshuffled rather than resigned. And then he'll be able to sit at home and spend more time with his headlines, re-reading that expression of "full confidence" and wondering where it all went wrong.

Updated: 11:48 Thursday, February 28, 2002