most commentators say that gordon brown is the heir apparent, the potential first-ballot victor in any labour party election race. that's what makes this column very interesting.

26 march, andrew rawsnley, the observer

quote:

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When Tony Blair should go is the wrong question at the moment. With one of his oldest and closest friends describing the Prime Minister's position as 'very grim', it is more interesting to ask why he survives.

A big part of the answer is Gordon Brown.

He is both the greatest menace to the Prime Minister and his lifesaver.

If he has rarely deigned to tell the Prime Minister what was going to be in his budgets, the cabinet is understandably terrified about how it might be treated by a Brown-led Downing Street. There has been a lot of personal rule from Tony Blair's sofa under the present incumbent. But there has at least been one contesting pole of power to Number 10. That has been the Treasury. There would be no check and balance to Prime Minister Brown because there would no longer be a Chancellor Brown.

You can run the Treasury by concentrating on one big project at a time. You can also disappear from view when it is politically convenient. A Prime Minister cannot go into denial. He has to be ever-visible as he has to have the capacity to juggle a multitude of balls at the same time.

'Can Gordon learn to delegate?' asks one of his colleagues.

Brown does not engage opponents. He sets out to obliterate them. What worries away even at some of his admirers is whether Prime Minister Brown would leave the voters feeling bullied as well. When asked to think of politicians as vehicles, focus groups describe him as a tank.

It is hugely to the credit of Gordon Brown that there has not been a single major economic calamity during his long reign at the Treasury. But it also means that we have little idea what he would be like in a crisis. When a princess dies in the middle of the night, when a bomb goes off in the middle of London, there is no time to commission a review or draw up five tests to determine the response. The reaction from the man in charge has to be both instant and superb. Blair has been fantastic at that thespian aspect of modern premiership; Brown has simply had no practice at it.

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I must say that Tony's talents as a thespian haven't worked all that well on me - and they don't seem to be working generally in Britain any more, do they?