CRISIS? What Crisis? So exclaimed Jim Callaghan in January 1979 during the winter of discontent. Except that he said no such thing.

The words Callaghan used were rather less exciting: "I don't think other people in the world would share the view there is mounting chaos."

The snappier version came courtesy of a headline in the Sun. And you don't need me to tell you that the newspaper's version stayed in the public mind, forever casting Callaghan as a man who couldn't spot a crisis when he saw one.

Crisis was a word much in evidence last week when the petrol ran dry. By Saturday tea-time everything had gone quiet, at least at Sainsbury's at Monks Cross, where the Sun's old headline could have been put to more pertinent use. There were a couple of other cars and a polite notice asking for customers to limit themselves to £20 worth of petrol (which was almost enough to get the old Volvo back home and leave fuel enough for a trip round the block).

A few days earlier, the country had gone mad and everyone was in a panic. Now I don't think a couple of days without petrol counts as a crisis. Surely a crisis should go on a bit longer and cause a bit more grief. Yet a crisis is a self-fulfilling thing, and if enough people think there is a crisis, a crisis is what you've got.

Ironically, just as these words are being written drivers are rushing to the pumps again, having heard a rumour from a friend who had it on very good authority from someone who thought he heard on the radio that the petrol blockades might be about to start again. Oh, how addicted we are to hysteria.

However you define a crisis, there is no doubt Tony Blair is in trouble - certainly for the moment, and possibly in the longer term too. The weekend opinion polls showed Labour either level with the Tories or trailing slightly, and then an ICM poll for The Guardian on Tuesday gave the Tories a four-point lead.

A number of points are worth raising here. Perspective should tell us that Tony Blair deserves to be judged on his wider performance and not just for the petrol crisis. The Tories, for their part, do not deserve to be ahead in the polls, because William Hague's bragging, populist crew are the least worthy opposition in years. Heavens, just look at the man. He couldn't one day be prime minister, could he?

Yet fairness doesn't come into politics, which is a shin-kicking business - and Tony's shin was there for the kicking. He didn't spot the petrol panic coming and for a while he didn't know what to do when it parked outside his door. When the fumes reached his nose, the prime minister said he wasn't giving in to the protesters, and this was surely the right stance to take. But it was a gamble and he hasn't uncrossed his fingers yet.

As for Hague's sudden 'popularity' in the polls well, it isn't fair and it is based on nothing other than anger with the Government. Yet that's the way politics rolls. New Labour's astonishing victory in 1997 had much to do with the deep unpopularity of the Tories, rather than being a sudden expression of evangelical partiality to Tony Blair.

If Blair has been left with unleaded on his face, other losers in the petrol-fuelled panic include the green lobby, because the perfectly-sound environ-mental argument for taxing petrol has been lost in the rush of four-star petulance.

How odd, in all this, that lorry drivers should emerge as the champions of the moment.

Lorries, in case it's slipped your mind, are mostly huge, noisy, smelly vehicles that make life miserable for millions of people. And by the way, who are the first to complain bitterly when French truckers blockade ports and cause inconvenience? Yup, our heroic English juggernaut jockeys.

What a funny, fume-filled world it is sometimes.