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Since he was first outmanoeuvred over the Labour party leadership in 1994 Gordon Brown has pursued a strategy as simple as it is ruthless: he identifies his most likely challenger and destroys him. Alan Milburn, David Blunkett and Charles Clarke were all once seen by Tony Blair as potential successors. Yet all now lie on the back benches embalmed, awaiting political burial. But there is one who remains defiantly at large, having sidestepped every landmine planted for him by fate or the Chancellor. Brownite bullets seem to slide off John Reid. ‘I am the current Home Secretary,’ he declared to guests at a Home Office reception on Tuesday evening, joking about his own survival record.

One of Tony Blair’s most cunning and cynical ploys in his early years as Labour leader was to model himself explicitly upon Margaret Thatcher. One of Tony Blair’s most cunning and cynical ploys in his early years as Labour leader was to model himself explicitly upon Margaret Thatcher. In 1995 he said, ‘She was a thoroughly determined person and that is an admirable qual-ity. It is important in politics to have a clear sense of direction, to know what you want.’ It was the Iron Lady, not his Labour predecessor, Jim Callaghan, whom he invited to No. 10 in his first days as Prime Minister. He postured — and postured is the word — as her true successor: a great domestic reformer and global statesman.

In 15 years of covering domestic politics I have never reported on anything half as sordid as Tuesday’s meeting between Tony Blair and David Cameron in the Prime Minister’s L-shaped Commons office. Afterwards David Cameron took it upon himself to issue the standard Blairite defence of the recent scandals: ‘We have a relatively uncorrupt party system but we do have a party funding system that is in a mess.’ Charlie Falconer, the Prime Minister’s chief apologist during the funding scandal, couldn’t have put it better. A spokesman for the Tory party indicated that the occasion was forward-looking, asserting that it was held to discuss looming reforms of party funding. But this claim made no sense. If true, there would have been no need for privacy.

Shortly before setting off on his Australian and Far Eastern tour, Tony Blair had a long discussion with Gordon Brown about the succession. The Chancellor was extremely clear. ‘Brown wanted a handover date by the end of the year,’ says my source, ‘with Brown coming in around the time of the party conference and Blair going out. It was all to be settled by conference.’ This conversation went into the intricate detail concerning the various constitutional and party mechanisms which need to be brought into play to secure a smooth succession. The role of John Prescott was raised. Brown wants Prescott to stay on as Deputy Prime Minister at least for a short time after the changeover of power, but to step down as deputy party leader.

In the last month Gordon Brown has made two personal gestures to David Cameron. The first was to send flowers to congratulate the Conservative leader on the birth of his son, and the second was to fashion his Budget into a no less direct political message saying, ‘I will destroy you.’ His speech on Wednesday was not about the shape of the British economy, but the shape of the weapon Labour requires to fight the Conservatives. This much was inevitable; what is striking are the tactics which Cameron has developed in counter-attack. His most biting remarks came not in his Budget response, but in an interview last month. ‘With Blair at Question Time, there is a sort of jokiness between us,’ he told the Sunday Times magazine.

In his Dimbleby Lecture last year, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, declared that ‘policing is becoming not only central to our understanding of citizenship, it is becoming a contestable political issue as never before’. He called for ‘open thought’ and an ‘open debate’. He said it was time for the police service to transform itself into ‘one holistic service’. In most police canteens they probably think that ‘holistic’ is a kind of glue. But Sir Ian is, if nothing else, a very unusual copper. He has the troubled countenance of a regional manager for Kwik-Fit Euro who is failing to make his targets and dreads every call from head office.

Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet secretary, has been obliged to deal with a considerable volume of intricate business in the course of his brilliant Whitehall career. When he was John Major’s press secretary in the mid-1990s Sir Gus was obliged to familiarise himself repeatedly with the private lives of Tory ministers and MPs. As a senior Treasury official under Gordon Brown he was forced to master the yet more perverse and arcane subject of working family tax credits. Yet nothing can have prepared Sir Gus for the complexity of his investigation into David Mills, husband of the Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell. The ministerial code is clear. It states that ministers should declare any gifts to family members.