More from The Week

At a coffee stall inside Lord’s cricket ground on Monday, two customers bumped into each other with a start. Alastair Campbell and Boris Johnson have not met since No. 10 Downing Street took this magazine to the Press Complaints Commission for exposing Tony Blair’s attempts to interfere with the Queen Mother’s lying-in-state, but that subject was not raised. Mr Johnson offered the usual icebreaker — when will Mr Blair resign? To his surprise, he was given a straight answer: ‘A year and a bit.’ It is now all but official: Mr Blair intends to leave the stage at next year’s Labour party conference. While a good deal shorter than the ‘full third term’ fraudulently promised to the electorate last May, it remains an ambitious target.

The language of priorities is the religion of socialism, said Nye Bevan. In fact, the setting of priorities is the basis of all practical politics. This is one of many reasons that David Cameron’s speech on social justice and crime this week was his worst error to date. It suggested — to an alarming extent — that his concerns do not mesh with those of the public. Some of what the Tory leader said about the breakdown of the traditional family and poor standards of education was sound enough. Much of his speech to the Centre for Social Justice consisted of forgettable bromides. But his remarks on ‘hoodies’ — whether a gimmick or a protestation of sincere principle — were a grave error.

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.

David Cameron had hoped to travel to Prague in secret last week. News that he had entered the final stages of negotiations with his Czech counterparts over the Tories’ future in the European Parliament would only increase expectation of the deal which has eluded him for the last seven months, and heighten the derision if he failed. While his visit did become public knowledge, he returned without the British press scenting what the Lidové Noviny had printed: that he will travel to Strasbourg later this month to form a new alliance of Eurosceptic parties, and finally quit the European Peoples’ Party.

After seven weeks of plotting, Charles Clarke could at least have delivered his punchline correctly. He declared to the BBC that as home secretary he had been ‘tough but populist, I beg your pardon, tough but not populist’. He attacked Tony Blair for losing ‘purpose and direction’ but said the Prime Minister should nonetheless stay until 2008. Each of his four interviews was primed to detonate on the same day, and each somehow seemed to misfire. Yet, for all its sloppiness, the Clarke attack has had a profound impact on No. 10. ‘The Prime Minister is running a mile’ announced his official spokesman — he referred to a charity jog but it was true more generally. No.

John Reid declared last week that his ‘starting point’ on convicted paedophiles was ‘that information [related to their whereabouts] should no longer remain the exclusive preserve of officialdom’. For daring to make this perfectly reasonable comment — and sending one of his ministers to America to investigate the procedures used there — the Home Secretary stands accused of bowing to the tabloid media, risking public hysteria and playing with populist fire. Before joining this chorus, it is worth reviewing the sequence of events that have led Mr Reid to this point.

David Cameron has so far baited Gordon Brown with the confidence of a schoolboy teasing a roped guard dog. The Chancellor has wanted to unleash himself on his opponent from the outset, but was restrained by No. 10 Downing Street on the basis that such attacks would be a waste of energy during the new party leader’s media honeymoon. Best wait until the public grow sick of the new-look Tories, the Blairites counselled — and then the Chancellor’s joyless team of character assassins could get to work. Six months later and time has only strengthened Mr Cameron’s opinion-poll lead, and sharpened the focus on Mr Brown’s weaknesses. No.

Perhaps the most bizarre spectacle in the dying days of Tony Blair’s time in No. 10 Downing Street has been the way in which he has joined protests and campaigns as if, somehow, he were not running the country. Last month, he signed a petition effectively demanding that the Prime Minister — that Mr Blair — give scientists better protection against animal rights activists. But nowhere is his sense of exasperation and helplessness more acute than in his one-man campaign against judges who hand down lenient sentences. Last summer, he sternly warned judges that ‘the rules of the game are changing’ after the 7 July attacks and that they had to get tougher on suspected terrorists.

After more than a decade of intellectual struggle, the Conservatives have finally made a political breakthrough over the National Health Service. Last month, when a thousand people were asked which party was ‘putting forward the best health policy’, the Tories finally claimed a lead. Men favoured the plan more than women, and even 8 per cent of Labour voters admitted they preferred David Cameron’s proposals to those of Tony Blair. To beat Labour on one of its flagship issues is indeed a remarkable triumph, but one marred by a technical flaw: the Conservatives do not have a health policy. The old one was torn up by Mr Cameron the day he became leader.

John Prescott has always claimed to be one of the unacknowledged founders of New Labour. It is certainly true that he took an early lead in modernising the party’s structure, championing the Private Finance Initiative and the coining of slogans: ‘traditional values in a modern setting’ came from the Prescott camp, not the restaurants of Islington. But the Deputy Prime Minister’s true significance to the Blair era has been even deeper. He has been the indispensable bridge between the Prime Minister and the Labour movement, the sidekick who has vouched for Tony Blair when he has appeared to be desecrating all that the party stands for.

It was once enough for the Conservative party to be seen as ‘cruel but competent’ It was once enough for the Conservative party to be seen, in Maurice Saatchi’s phrase, as ‘cruel but competent’. Lord Saatchi was among the first to warn, however, that this formula has had its day. Black Wednesday robbed the Tories of their reputation for competence, while Gordon Brown’s decision to make the Bank of England independent showed that Labour had every intention of stealing that mantle. At the same time, voters expect more now from their politicians. It was George W.