NATURE has its own ruthless rhythms. Just as the days are getting shorter, just as the swallows are leaving, just as our primary school children have moved back into classes which can contain 36 or 38 children, so our Taoiseach scents an election and has begun to look good. It is the way of the world.

Last week we saw Drumcondra Bertie morph into Brussels Bertie -international dynamo and monarch of all he surveys. A good interview on Morning Ireland last Tuesday, a happy time at the parliamentary party conference in Westport - nice speech- and suddenly it's out of the anorak, into the velvet smoking jacket and it's chocks away for another election win.

The oldest war horses in Fianna Fail may feel weary at the prospect of yet another battle. His own backbenchers may be ambiguous about another five years under Bertie, who lies on them like a stone; they have no prospect of a leadership change if Bertie wins the election.

But one thing is for sure - Bertie ain't tired and he ain't ambiguous.

With the PDs in turmoil, Bertie is able to view his own troops with Buddha-like calm. It was a blistering week for his pal and fellow pragmatist, Tony Blair, with Labour backbenchers revolting and his heir presumptive screaming at him in Number 10. Bertie has never been too proud to learn. It will be a cold day in hell before that sort of mess explodes around him. On Tuesday he will celebrate his 55th birthday, and he says that he will leave politics when he is 60. However, Bertie has always been tough on party democracy, and tough on the causes of party democracy. In the nine years of his rule it has been easy to forget that Fianna Fail has any backbenchers at all. Certainly they seem to have slipped Bertie's mind altogether. He'd break their hands before he'd let them write him any impertinent letters.

Bertie used to be known as 'The Teflon Taoiseach', but the truth is that no one knows what he is made of.

Even after his thirty years as a public representative in a country as small as this one Bertie remains, as Julie Burchill once remarked in another connection, as mysterious as a mermaid. The upper part of Bertie can charm the prime ministers of Europe, make hardened international politicians believe in him and trust him, have them hug him and refer to him warmly by his Christian name. The lower half of him just paddles along, hoping for the best, and giving the occasional devastating lash to his enemies. He has that great gift - common in people who are the youngest in their families - of being able to fit in wherever he is. When there is no election on the horizon Bertie seems worryingly happy to drift with the tide. Yet he has the ability to lure the electorate overboard - one more time.

It is rather lovely to watch Bertie when he knows what he wants. His cleverness and his legendary charm are now trained like two lasers on the election booth. For a man - for a country - sadly lacking in focus and in ideas an election comes as a refreshing deadline. Seasoned Bertie watchers were struck by how relaxed and well Bertie appeared to be in Westport, after a summer during which he was thought to be looking a little rough.

The worst thing anyone could say about him was that his nose was rather red, but that can happen any one of those of us over forty, when we are filmed without make up.

On the whole Bertie was thought to be at ease with the media in Westport, shaking hands with the lady reporters in the shoe shop before he tried on a pair of size tens, ready to hit the pavements of the nation. And if he exaggerated his shoe size, and had to be demoted from a size eleven, this was a sign of his natural optimism and - as Miriam Lord commented in The Irish Times - is a classically male trait.

In Tuesday's interview with Aine Lawlor Bertie managed to sound at once sincere, humble and slightly pained. Actually he managed to sound clear: this was no bumbling Bertie. Perhaps Bertie only bumbles when he is not concentrating - or when he is deliberately hiding the truth.

This sounded like Bumbling Bertie's older, smarter brother. If he pointed out that Enda Kenny had been around for a long time, this probably came from the new experience of having to face a prettier rival. Listening to Bertie on Tuesday, reading his speech in the newspapers, it took a slight effort of will to remember that this is the leader of a country with a hospital system that is a cesspit of chaos -not to mention MRSA. That our small towns have no garda presence at all - their police stations have been closed, very possibly forever, although given the mismanagement and corruption of the police force, this might be just as well. That in our prisons men are kept nine to a cell, in conditions that would have us getting very cross if they pertained in Guatanamo Bay. That our bus workers go on strike because there aren't enough buses to travel in the new Quality Bus Corridors of the cities, and in the country there is no public transport at all.

Still on Tuesday Bertie managed to sound the opposite of smug, whilst remaining confident that he was the only man to fix all this. Sometimes it's hard to remember that, by the time of the election, he will have been Taoiseach for ten years, and a TD for 30. Bertie always seems so surprised by problems. He told Aine Lawlor that he had been "appalled" last year by the stories coming out of our Accident and Emergency departments. He had been equally horrified some years previously to discover that attendance at inner city schools in Dublin improved dramatically when the schools started providing the pupils with breakfast. But if the prime minister of a country is not aware of its collapsing health service and its pockets of poverty and deprivation then who is? Not many people would say this about Bertie, but sometimes one cannot help feeling that he should get out more. Out of the political world, that is.

Even in this excellent radio performance Bertie sometimes pushed it too far.

When Aine Lawlor asked him about being in power Bertie replied, deadpan: "I never consider it power". Which is good coming from a man who served his political apprenticeship under Charles Haughey, who memorably described him as "the most cunning, the most ruthless of them all". As we learned from the Moriarty tribunal, Bertie signed blank cheques for Charles Haughey. The only person who half-believes this virgin-in-the-politicalwhorehouse routine is Bertie himself.

Everyone else knows he's much better than that.

Above all, his own advisers know that he is miles better than any of the other party leaders, and they are pushing their boy out front. Bertie is much more popular than his own party and electorally Fianna Fail are banking on his attractiveness as a political personality to bring them home . . . again.

C.V.
Name: Bertie Ahern
Age: 55 on Tuesday
Position: Taoiseach and keen to keep the job for another five years.
In the news: He kicked off Election 2007 with a polished and powerful performance in an interview with Aine Lawlor on Morning Ireland.