What if Blair and Brown are secretly close friends?
Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday I have often wondered if alleged 'artists' such as Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst really can paint and sculpt. I treasure the thought that, once they've made their fortunes and collected all the gongs on offer, they will reveal a great stock of beautiful pictures and statues, kept secret until then and say "Actually we are real artists - but we realised that in this debased society unmade beds and pickled fish would get us fame and fortune, whereas real skills wouldn't". In something like the same vein, it crosses my mind that Anthony Blair and Gordon Brown have no real reason to be enemies. Mr Blair is an undistinguished barrister who can barely speak in sentences and knows very little about anything. I have often wondered if he ever actually argued a case in court, and appeal to anyone who knows of him having done so to tell me. He appears to believe in nothing at all, and is also not very interested in politics, which is what - I suspect - makes him so attractive to ordinary voters, who aren't interested in it either. On TV he looks nice and human - though in real life he has a strangely vacant air, which is often the case with those the camera loves. Gordon Brown, on the other hand, is a great grinding brain of a man, marked out as unusually brilliant since childhood. He can finish his sentences, though few others can be bothered to wait for him to do so, they are so long and complex. He knows everything about everything, reads books hungrily. He plainly believes in his ghastly 1930s vision of a society run benevolently by a mighty state, in which we should be grateful for any few pennies the taxman leaves us to spend on ourselves. He looks pretty terrible on TV, addresses people as if they were vast public meetings but has a private reputation for being charming company. These two need each other, always have, possibly always will. Mr Blair, who loves Chequers and flying round the world and being applauded, gets the empty toys of office while he fools the dimmer voters - and the even dimmer Tories - into the belief that Labour has changed fundamentally. Mr Brown, who despises luxury and loves work, gets to run - and ruin - the country. And to prove that, fundamentally, Labour hasn't changed. Why hurry to end this comfortable, well-paid arrangement? Mr Brown is quite clever enough to know that the title of Prime Minister isn't worth a bucket of warm spit compared with the enormous real powers he has at the Treasury. Meanwhile, Mr Blair couldn't ever get another job that paid him so well, or gave him such a nice tied house as Chequers. Only politics could ever have wafted such a nonentity into such luxury and adulation. There's no reason to believe the two men 'disagree' about anything fundamental. It would be hard for them to do so because Mr Blair has never suffered from opinions on anything anyway. Insiders assure me that Mr Brown was just as keen on the Iraq war as Mr Blair. Do they differ over schools, tax, the EU, transport, identity cards, anything important? So why the quarrel? Far more likely, it seems to me, that the two pretend to be bitter rivals to give the political journalists and bored backbenchers something to do. They can spend ages wasting time and space on this pointless Kremlinology, when otherwise they might have to worry about the fact that there is no opposition, that British liberties are vanishing so fast they've almost disappeared, or the fact the country is now so far down the plumbing that it will take Dyno-Rod to get us out again.
