Blair & Brown: dancing cheek to cheek. posted by Richard Seymour

George Galloway has described Blair and Brown as "two cheeks of the same arse". Well, something has certainly come between them.

This morning, The Guardian reports yet another offensive from the Brownites. After all the Hamlet-like procrastination, this morose, bumbling, reactionary Chancellor - who was, until now, too much i'the sun - finally invites the Crown-in-Parliament to drink of his own poison. The most unpopular Labour Prime Minister in history, say the polls. Cameron ahead, say the polls. It's worse than Harold Wilson after devaluation, say the polls. Blairite assurances worthless, say the Brownies. Time to go - either with an orderly transition or with tears and backstabbing.

Obviously, this belated gesture (I daren't call it more than that) involves nothing so vulgar as principle. It is over when Brown will become Prime Minister (since no one has yet emerged to oppose him) and how much control he will exercise over the party apparatus against the Blairites. Brown has been, in many ways, even more right-wing than Blair. I don't know if even the Prime Minister would have had the balls to suggest that Britons be proud of the legacy of the British Empire, for instance. He bankrolled and publicly supported every New Labour war, and has been coming out more and more as something of a neoconservative. Nor is he the economic wizard he is reputed to be, having relied on a mixture of high consumer debt, low wages (which is what the inflation policy is about), and a strong pound which - while beneficial to the financial sector - has destroyed manufacturing jobs. Not a tenable position. He strongly pushes privatisation, while supporting ID cards, longer detention for 'terror suspects' and pension cuts. And his 'vision', such as it is, is raggedly impoverished. Here is how he laid out his pitch to lead New Labour:

We are about propriety, we are about security and law and order, and we are about giving people the best public services.

Propriety? Fucking propriety? Either this was a coded message to someone who has secrets, or Brown simply chose the word out of the same hat that contains 'law', 'order', 'decent', 'respect', 'hardworking', 'best', 'renewed', 'family', 'tough', 'fair', 'sensible', 'British', 'proud', 'honour', 'justice', 'blood', 'soil', 'dealbation', 'haematencephalon', 'scrophulariaceous' and so on.

What is more, I doubt that even with these manoeuvres Brown is going to force the issue, or that his succession will do him any good. He still awaits a seamless transition, and Blair is evidently clever enough to string it out just long enough to avoid his own humiliation while Brown inherits the party in time to lose. Brown has in the past outpolled Cameron by some 12 percentage points on the question of who would make a good Prime Minister, but the latest poll indicates that when it comes to the vote, Brown would lose in this contest. Brown simply has nothing to offer to Labour voters, except those sad, deluded few who actually imagine that Brown is in any conceivable way politically distinguishable from Blair.

That said, and all that taken into account, Blair's departure will certainly be worth a drink accompanied by some random acts of destruction when it eventually comes.