Fraser Nelson

Tony Blair, at least, knows how to keep his silence. When asked about David Miliband’s leadership prospects at his press conference on Tuesday, he repeatedly dodged all questions — knowing that so much as a supportive grunt from him would damage the Environment Secretary’s chances. But as he probably already knew, the issue had been resolved. The Prime Minister’s allies have been less discreet, and their support proved toxic. It was, in a brutal irony, the older Blairites who administered the kiss of death to Miliband’s chances of becoming the next PM. The rumblings of the past few weeks are the closest the Labour party is going to get to a serious leadership contest. In practice, we have witnessed a mini-Cold War.

A fortnight ago, I was invited along to a dinner with John Reid in the private room of a London hotel. It sounded wonderfully conspiratorial, arranged at just a few hours’ notice at a time when speculation about the Labour party leadership was rife. I bounded in to find about a dozen other journalists and the most unwelcome guest of all: an overhead projector at the top of the table. We had been summoned to hear about the Home Office reorganisation he had announced that day. All remarks that night were off the record, as is customary. But it would betray no confidences to say that Mr Reid rather disappointed those who had been hoping for a hint that he was about to knife Gordon Brown.

The slide towards extinction in Scotland has persuaded the Tories to draw up a blueprint for separation, says Fraser Nelson. The Scottish Tories would split off — and Cameron’s Conservatives would become the English party For the son of an Aberdonian stockbroker, David Cameron has had an uneasy relationship with Scotland. It is a land of massacred Conservatives, even less hospitable to his party today than it was during the great Tory wipe-out ten years ago. In his visits north of the border, the Tory leader has not so much tried to lead the remaining Scottish Tories to victory, but to check their pulse. In London, there is serious concern that the patient is not responding.

A silencer may have been fitted on the starting gun, but no one in Westminster can doubt that the Gordon Brown leadership campaign is now fully up and running. Ministers are being telephoned and asked when their names can be released as supporters of the Chancellor. Geoff Hoon, still smarting from his demotion to Europe Minister, has found himself promoted to the Chancellor’s ‘campaign committee’. Jack Straw has been announced as its manager, with no idea whom he is supposed to fight. It matters little; for now, these men are ornaments. The real Brown machine has been 13 years in the making, and remains focused on its single purpose: the elimination of any rival candidate. ‘They will have a grid,’ says one Whitehall source.

David Cameron has never quite understood why so many of his Conservative colleagues are so keen on America. In the build-up to the Iraq war, he was bemused to watch close political friends applauding the Prime Minister’s alliance with the White House and, with it, the Iraq war. He still refers to them as ‘you neocons’, and has only half-jokingly applied this label to George Osborne, his shadow chancellor. Now he is finally adjusting the party’s position. The formula which Charles Kennedy used during the Iraq war, that Britain should be a ‘candid friend’ to America, has in effect become the new Conservative policy. William Hague tells anxious colleagues this is a return to the Thatcher–Reagan era of candour.

It is a strange form of bombardment. Days, sometimes weeks, can pass without any movement from the Metropolitan Police and it seems as if the all-clear is about to be sounded above the Downing Street bunker. Then, from nowhere, comes another arrest, a fresh revelation, and the turmoil starts again. Even the sadist in Gordon Brown will have seen enough by now, knowing that the pain inflicted on Tony Blair is inflicting lasting damage to the reputation of the party Brown will soon lead. Once, the Chancellor hoped to draw a line under the disastrous loans-for-honours debacle with a triple whammy of legislation. He would agree a deal on party funding, the honours system and House of Lords reform which, together, could be billed as a new constitutional covenant.

Just after the 2001 election, the triumphant Tony Blair had a plan: he would split the Home Office in two. The PM had been appalled by its performance in New Labour’s first term and had already decided to move Jack Straw to the Foreign Office. But the problem, he feared, could only be solved by creating two new departments. Peter Mandelson urged him to proceed — yet, in the event, both were talked out of it by the Civil Service. I am told that Mr Blair has regretted this ever since. He will now have his revenge from beyond the political grave. John Reid’s new blueprint to create two distinct departments — Justice and Security — is unlikely to be enacted until Mr Blair has left No. 10.

How much does a hamburger really cost? Within this question, as one of David Cameron’s senior advisers explained to me, lies the Conservatives’ new driving philosophy. A Big Mac costs £1.99. But if children guzzle too many they become obese and inflict a burden on the National Health Service. The taxpayer funds this treatment — so the burger costs more than the child’s family originally pays. Might a responsible Tory government ensure the child pays what the burger truly costs? In an underground auditorium on the Strand on Monday, Mr Cameron convened a one-day conference to discuss such issues. Speakers were lined up and copies of a book of his speeches were piled up outside.

The Byron Consort Choir of Harrow School is exacting in its choice of audience. It has sung for popes and for royalty — and the setting for its performance at Blenheim Palace one night last month was grand enough for either. Trumpeters manned the gates and candles led the way to the Long Library where one long table was set for 175. Pol Roger’s Winston Churchill champagne was served and a Churchill descendant, Nicholas Soames MP, was supplied to speak about his grandfather. But guests had paid their £5,000-a-head ticket not for the music, the Churchillian speeches or even the dazzling setting but for an even more exclusive experience: an audience with David and Samantha Cameron. Never was so much donated by so few.

It is hard to describe the Slave Trade Abolition Bill 1807 as a Labour victory, given that it predates the party by a century. Still, this does not deter Tony Blair or Gordon Brown from staking their claim to it. ‘The reactionaries told us that to abolish slavery was an impossible cause,’ the Chancellor recently declared to Labour members. Abolition was a great victory against ‘Tory money’, said the Prime Minister. On the eve of the bicentennial year of William Wilberforce’s legislation, both men are preparing to take a vicarious (if wholly undeserved) bow. Set aside the fact that Wilberforce was a Tory MP. Messrs Blair and Brown make a deeper error in presuming that slavery has been banished from Britain. It has come back — and on their watch.