Fraser Nelson

There is a curious sound Labour MPs make when Tony Blair is on form, a kind of yodel which resonates around the chamber. We heard plenty of it this afternoon, as he wiped the floor with David Cameron.  Do the Tories really want to abolish all NHS targets? Isn't that pandering to health unions? The answer is yes, of course; when Cameron quoted a doctors union leader attacking the government it confirmed the point. Blair could get away with this, Brown couldn't.  I am optimistic about Tory education policies, for reasons I explain in tomorrow’s magazine. But Tory health policy is a pusillanimous disaster, and the sooner Mr Cameron prizes himself away from the unions the better.

Just back from David Cameron's press conference. It was a Blair-style "beat the goalie" session, with journalists invited to ask him nasty questions until they were exhausted. And, like Blair, he walked away unscathed. As ever, I have gripes: he's still using the meaningless phrase "Social Responsibility" to sum up what his Conservatism is about. But compare his performance to Gordon Brown's last week. Cameron answered each question in an interesting and attention-holding way: Brown lost his audience by descending into cliché and platitudes each time. Cameron called each journalist by name: Brown had Jack Straw asking "is there anyone here from the Daily Mail".

Should Scotland have its own Olympic team? Alex Salmond thinks so, and his point is far from trivial. For the SNP, politics is sport carried on by other means. I was working in a bar during the 1992 Olympics in the naval town of Rosyth, and I’ll never forget the celebration there when Linford Christie’s won the 100 metres. Nor will I forget the dismay of one regular, a Scottish nationalist, who hated to see his fellow Scots cheer a British victory. In Scotland, the chance to cheer a world-class sporting success comes all too rarely. On Andrew Marr ‘s BBC show today, Mr Salmond said I suffer from “Scottish cringe”. Far from it. I’m just proud of being British. And like two-thirds of my countrymen, I’d like Scotland to stay that way.

A sense of stagnation has descended upon the House of Commons. The king is dead, and yet the new king will not be enthroned for weeks. Nothing much can happen in the meantime. After delivering his latest farewell speech, Tony Blair is still making spectral appearances around the country for purposes no one is quite able to establish. Labour MPs sit around in groups, distracting themselves with the folly of the deputy leadership race. Neither they, nor anyone else in Westminster, have anything useful to do. The only show in town is Gordon Brown. The Chancellor has been a turbine of activity. He has been giving speeches, entering debates, glad-handing pensioners and starring in one £10-a-ticket show entitled ‘The Man Behind the Politics’.

My political column has only just been published, and already I’m getting stick for being soft on Gordon Brown. Here’s my case: few can deny Brown has great political skills, unrivalled grasp of detail and is a masterful strategist. And he has character traits which may lead him to deliver many things Conservatives would applaud.  Like Blair, he needs to keep Thatcher’s old voters. He’ll certainly try to. And my column simply seeks to explain how.  Will he succeed? My hunch is not, and that he’ll lose the next election. But from now till then, we can expect the auld fox to use every trick at his disposal.

When John Reid was asked if he’d stand for Labour party leader, he would always give the same sort of reply. ‘I have a life outside politics,’ he told me at the last Labour conference. ‘I play the guitar, I play piano. I have a house in France. I could walk away from all this tomorrow, and my life would not collapse. Now you may believe me, or you may not believe me: I don’t give a ...’. At the time, I didn’t believe him. Not for a second. Mr Reid seemed to be the classic political animal. Ministerial red boxes from his many government posts are lined up in his parliamentary office like hunting trophies.

So what will the new Brown era be like? No more of that nasty spin? Those who attended Anthony Browne's leaving party on Tuesday evening found out different. As Chief Political Correspondent of The Times, he has been asked to get the Treasury's response to the newspaper's extraordinary scoop that Gordon Brown had been warned about the damage his 1997 pensions raid would do. Reply came in the form of a text message from Damian McBride – a former VAT press officer now special adviser to the Chancellor.   This, bear in mind, was the story the Treasury had spent two years trying to suppress by seeking to refuse The Times' Freedom of Information request. It knew very well what the “news” was.

Fans of Thatcher’s famous no confidence debate performance shortly before her downfall, will be pleased to note that the same fey eloquence is enlivening Tony Blair’s final few performances. Oliver Letwin’s obscure musings on the way forward for Cameronism were ripe for being lampooned by Blair who was on superb form today; the walls in the chamber were almost shaking with the cheers of Labour MPs who know that the Blair show has just 6 weeks left to run. Ever the thespian, Blair has laid on a show for us tomorrow. He’ll resign to the Cabinet in the morning, fly to his Sedgefield constituency by helicopter and make another farewell speech. In a quirk of Parliamentary timing, Brown will be answering Treasury Questions at the time.

The latest Westminster gossip: he was told by Gordon Brown he wouldn’t be Home Secretary or Foreign Secretary—the only acceptable alternative for him. Perhaps Brown thought his cabinet would be too Scottish, perhaps he wanted to make way for these new young faces and have ”maximum flexibility” (Reid’s words not Brown’s) for his reshuffle. Or perhaps, Brown didn’t want to govern with a rival power base in the cabinet, which the indomitable Reid would certainly have become. So Reid chose the back benches over demotion, just as Charles Clarke did. I gather Reid won’t be giving interviews in the next couple of days, so we’ll have to wait for the definitive version of events.

When I was a reporter in the Scottish Parliament seven years ago, I wrote a piece on the life of the poor Hansard reporters up there. The MSPs were not the most educated types and the Official Report staff had to un-garble their words every night. They claimed some was Scots. But one phrase made it through to the record: a Scottish Nationalist saying his rival was “elected by a ba hair of 38 votes”. Today, the SNP won the Scottish Parliament by a ba’ hair of one seat: 47 seats to 46. Or, 32.2% to 32.9%. Savour this result: it is just enough to oust Labour, give them  a spanking but not enough for the nationalists to claim any moral superiority. Factor in those 100,000 spoiled votes, and who knows what the real result was?

Might Labour keep Scotland after all? I’m told Labour HQ in Glasgow is fairly chirpy this evening. The YouGov poll predicting their defeat doesn’t chime with what they’ve picked up from postal voting, nor the gossip from the exit polls. I can well believe this. There is something in the DNA of Scots, which makes them take a step back in the privacy of the polling booth before voting nationalist. Scotland is the story of the elections. Gordon Brown has been campaigning there pretty much non-stop. If Labour does survive today’s vote then the headline on Saturday’s papers will be “Gordon Brown saves the union”. All exciting stuff. For the first time since 1955, the vote in Scotland genuinely seems to be on a knife-edge.