Fraser Nelson

On Monday, perhaps for the first time in his life, David Cameron turned right after boarding an aircraft. There is no business class in the RAF Hercules that ferried him to Afghanistan; to enter it by door rather than by loading ramp is luxury enough, and the only in-flight entertainment is an industrial-strength headset to deaden the sound of the engines. Icebergs aside, this was his first serious foreign trip as leader. Since 9/11, Tory policy on the war on terror — with the exception of Michael Howard’s wobble over Iraq — has been largely inseparable from that of Tony Blair; so much so that the Prime Minister has often left the Commons chamber with the wrong kind of applause ringing in his ears.

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.

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.

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.

The Home Office vs the Treasury: No. 10 has become the Department for the Prime Minister’s Legacy, leaving the two great domestic departments to slug it out. But does John Reid have what it takes to thwart the Chancellor’s ambition for the top job? When John Reid was appointed Home Secretary last month, his staff presented him with a rather macabre gift: a league table of the shortest-serving secretaries of state in the department’s 225-year history. With each passing week he could count how many people he had outlasted. Mr Reid loved the present, especially as he had already beaten the 2nd Earl of Shelburne, who — according to the Home Office briefing at least — had lasted only six days in 1782.

Fraser Nelson says that the Tory leader knows that his campaign to win over the Lib Dem voters may not succeed in the local elections. But he has decided not to change his strategy a jot: the chameleon’s not for turning David Cameron could hardly wish for a better backdrop to next week’s English local elections. The Home Secretary admits that a thousand foreign ex-convicts have slipped the deportation net and been left at large. The Health Secretary is heckled by union workers and spectacularly mishandles a National Health Service crisis. Donors in the loans-for-ermine scandal are demanding their money back, and the Deputy Prime Minister confesses to an extramarital affair.

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.

On Gordon Brown’s bookshelf stands a new title likely to stand out from the others: In Our Hands: a Plan to Replace the Welfare State. It is a detailed proposal to abolish all benefit payments, from pensions to child support, and instead make a cash payment to every adult in the country. Its author is Charles Murray, the controversial American academic who firmly believes that the Chancellor’s welfare policies are destroying the social fabric of Britain with calamitous results. Infuriatingly for his army of critics, Murray has become too influential to be ignored. His first book, arguing that benefits were breeding rather than alleviating poverty, set the intellectual framework for America’s acclaimed welfare reform.

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.