TEN weeks or so away from the general election and the issue of trust continues to plague a Prime Minister eager to convince the country that he has learned the hard lessons of his Iraq misadventure and is now firmly in listening mode.

The biggest mistake the Labour Party could make is that this issue is solely about the electorate not trusting Tony Blair. It's not. The traffic has been going in the other direction for some time now. It's not that we don't trust Blair. The political reality is that he doesn't trust us . . . and maybe never has.

Trust is a difficult concept in politics. It routinely implies a degree of honesty in how problems and policies are laid out. It implies a healthy regard for alternative solutions and a belief that a well-argued, well-planned, well-executed government policy will be acknowledged as such. Trust implies a belief that laying out the facts will return a reward, with political capital that can be spent in future ventures. For a trusted government it means an electorate who feel genuinely represented, government of the people, not government over people.

But what happens when a leader no longer trusts the people he represents?

Worse, what happens when a leader no longer even appears to trust the advice of expert political opinion around him, preferring instead to rely only on one locus of information and judgement, namely his own.

Over the decision to go to war in Iraq, over the apparent determination to reform the Lords, over the decision to rework the framework of Britain's constitutional structures and even down to the decision to reform the office of the Lord Chancellor, Tony Blair appears to have relied on information taken from the one source he believes to be infallible . . . himself. The result? A trail of shambolic decisions which has left legal debris and chaos that stretches from London to Edinburgh, and from to New York to Baghdad and beyond.

The continuing shambles of the government's attempt to revise plans for its proposed terror bill, again shows Blair as a Prime Minister unwilling to listen, unwilling to bend and unwilling to acknowledge that he may have got it wrong on this crucial issue. Blair is a trained lawyer - indeed trained lawyers are not a scarcity in the Blair government - yet he continues to play fast and loose with legal principles of British justice which must have been underlined in any jurisprudence course he has taken.

In the aftermath of 9/11, burdened by the prospect of a similar attack on UK soil on his watch, the emergency powers demanded by the government which were fast-tracked through parliament may have been an understandable legal reflex.

But such power, as the Law Lords judgment earlier this year highlighted, has been used in ways that threaten to turn Britain into the kind of authoritarian state we fondly believe is found only in other parts of the world.

The Lords concluded that the detention of alleged terrorist suspects held in Belmarsh prison without charge or trial was unlawful and against the Human Rights Act and the European Convention On Human Rights. In effect the Lords told the government to revise our terror laws, quickly. Now a matter of a week or so away from the date when the current law ends, the Home Office is enmeshed in an untimely legal bun-fight where it again appears reluctant to take into account any learned opinion other than its own.

Despite some successful negotiating and hinted compromises, the government remains wedded to the idea that politicians - and not judges - should have the overriding jurisdiction over terror suspects. The result - despite effective and rigorous counter-arguments being laid out for the government by many of the country's best legal minds - remains a dangerous collision course that will see Britain still in breach of the European convention. The government fails to accept the legal principle that if the liberty of even one citizen is illegally threatened, all of us are threatened.

Why? It comes down to trust. Blair trusts nobody but himself to combat the threat of terrorism and protect the nation. Once again we are expected to believe that Blair is privy to secret information which, were it to be made public, would justify the actions he is now proposing. We heard the same argument in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, yet when the information was eventually made public it was revealed to be entirely bogus.

The Prime Minister has spent the past few weeks trying to convince the country that he has learned valuable lessons from his experience over Iraq; that he is a listening Prime Minister, prepared to consult and be influenced. In reality, he is as unbending and dogmatic as ever.

Blair may believe that a system of justice to combat terrorism that by-passes the need for evidence argued in a court of law and is determined on a political rather than a judicial basis is acceptable. He is wrong. Again.