One day at the Commons recently, just before Prime Minister’s Questions, David Cameron found himself in the gents next to Gordon Brown. The two said a brief hello and then silence fell. As Mr Brown left, he said to the Conservative leader over his shoulder: ‘Good luck’.
What struck me — beyond the mischievous interpretation that this was a shade disloyal to his own leader — was that it was the first time Mr Brown has sent a message to the Tory leader that their relationship will outlive the premiership of Mr Blair. Unless a meteor arrives to unseat him from the role as successor to Mr Blair, Brown vs Cameron is the shape of the next election. Indeed, its first skirmishes are already being fought, even while the PM remains stubbornly in post.
The Times/Populus poll this week shows that voters too are beginning to consider the prospect. While the ‘Blair brand’ gets a pasting, asking respondents about a Labour party led by Mr Brown produces a two-point rise for Labour and a better share of the Lib Dem vote.
To date, the Chancellor’s response to the arrival of Mr Cameron has been to ignore him (apart from in the gents). He seeks instead to exude solidity and reliability, a response to changing and sometimes threatening times and also a subliminal contrast to Mr Cameron’s youth and lightness of demeanour. His efforts, when not trying to unseat Mr Blair, are aimed at projecting this into our minds at every opportunity. So the decision to embrace atomic power sent the message that he is prepared to tackle the party’s instinctive anti-nuclear leanings, because global uncertainties on energy supply demand nothing less. The ‘nuclear option’ is being deployed in more ways than one. The Mansion House speech committing Labour to the renewal of Trident outflanked the PM on a project of key national importance as well as announcing that he will not mess with British defences — and damn the backbench outrage.
The more Mr Brown can disappoint the Left, the better for him. There is an interpretation which sees him sacrificing vital support on the backbenches as he slaughters their sacred cows, opening the contest to a serious challenge. If only. The sober truth, as far as mainstream Labour left or right is concerned, is that Gordon is the best option it has. To fail to confirm him as the next leader after such a long period in waiting would cause a party now irretrievably split into factions to splinter into multiple shards. Electoral disaster would surely follow. Anyway, no minister who might challenge him has been able to define himself clearly against him.
Thud, thud, thud go Mr Brown’s policy initiatives and curtailments. Ideas unapproved by Gordon Brown Inc haven’t a hope. This week John Reid had to back off from merging police forces because the Chancellor refused to bear the cost. The same approach has put paid to ID cards on grounds of cost. ‘A Blair idea,’ says a Brown ally. RIP.
Just as he grabbed control of the ‘five tests’ to prevent Britain adopting the euro when Mr Blair was in favour, Mr Brown intends to define the contours of some major practical arguments while Mr Cameron is offering open-ended commentary on the national condition and ‘aroma’ of a gentler, more considerate and less exclusive Tory politics.
The Brown assault is beginning to box in Mr Cameron rather earlier in some areas than he would like. The period of flirtation with an anti-nuclear cause is now replaced by grudging acquiescence. Trident was a fait accompli before the Conservatives could even turn it over in their minds. Mr Cameron’s approach is lightness of being versus the blunderbuss. It is — unless you are an infuriated right-wing Conservative — relaxing to behold. The relentless Mr Brown is seldom that.
What he does lack is ease: not unimportant for someone trying to do the job in politics which most demands spontaneity and rapid reaction. Last summer, I endured a Woody Allen-esque five minutes of comic desperation at the reception after Robin Cook’s funeral, trapped between Mr Blunkett, his guide dog and a wall after the Chancellor simply placed his bulk where it was most convenient in order to address his colleague. There was no escape that did not entail clambering over a very large dog.
Appearances aside, the area where Mr Cameron can make most hay with Mr Brown’s record is in his excessive trust in the state as an agency of social change. ‘Only the state can guarantee fairness,’ said a leading Brownite recently. This approach remains the weakest flank of his beliefs. It leads him to create — or expand — state agencies to levels where, when things go wrong, the amounts involved are vast. The massive tax credit frauds and overpayments revealed this week are so large because he insists on making his various projects so all-encompassing
A list of expensive woes trails in his wake, from the Lifelong Learning Scheme, ditched because take-up was so low, and the Sure Start scheme for young people, which fails the poorest and needs to be re-assessed. Ditto the new deal on Welfare to Work, which has been only partly successful because it fudged for so long any real reform of the benefit system.
Yet he is reassuring to the markets and the City because he has a strong and proven and unchanged macro-economic outlook. If he is caught out for his overborrowing by a downturn in the coming year, he will argue that the eurozone is likely to perform far worse, which serves to remind us of his best decision yet in government — not to adopt the euro.
I now expect Mr Brown to move ‘rightwards’ by aligning himself more firmly to the idea of public-service reform. Of course, the differences and strains with the radical late-Blairite approach will remain, but they will be concealed in the run-up to a handover, most probably in the next year. This is the territory in which he is, as one aide puts it, ‘itching’ to engage Mr Cameron, because he believes that it is where the contradictions in his approach are easiest to flush out.
On the fraught matter of what exactly it means to love a hoodie, Mr Brown’s private response was withering. The author of the phrase ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ was not Mr Blair, who deployed it so effectively, but the Chancellor who was furious when it was purloined. ‘Gordon will not be outflanked on crime and social care by anyone,’ says a ministerial enforcer. ‘And he won’t be loving up to the hoodies either.’
So on crashes the Chancellor with his ‘hard choices’ on which he believes his leadership will flourish against the new Tory challenge. It is a fascinating, competitive preview of the era beyond Blair: one man with a long past and all its accumulated weight and dust, and one still inventing himself, already vying for control of the future. Only a fool would predict the outcome.
The Conservative leader has a racing start in the political stock market behind him. But the risk-averse should not pile their capital exclusively into Camerons just yet. Shrewd traders also buy Browns.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor of the Evening Standard.