The final Blair–Brown battle

16 June 2007

Fraser Nelson says that Tony Blair’s swansong summit next week is fraught with danger for Gordon Brown. The last thing the next Prime Minister wants in his in-tray is a new EU constitution that he has to sell to the British public

The office layout inside No. 10 may not sound like the most pressing issue facing the incoming ‘administration’ (as Blair’s outgoing aides call the Brown regime). But to those in Whitehall, like the factions at a Tudor court, such matters have the greatest symbolic importance. The plan is that Simon McDonald and Jon Cunliffe, Mr Brown’s foreign policy adviser and European adviser respectively, will not sit in No. 10 like their predecessors, but in the Cabinet Office alongside Jeremy Heywood, his new domestic affairs adviser.

Logistically, it means they will be three minutes away from the Prime Minister’s office rather than 20 seconds. In the power game of Whitehall that’s light years: the door which connects No. 10 to the Cabinet Office marks the crucial threshold between inner and outer circle. Mr Brown’s aides argue that this shows that normal business is being resumed. No more Blair-style government within a government. Sir Humphrey is being invited back in from the cold.

That is only one way of looking at it: the Whitehall Kremlinologists conclude that Mr Brown is now happy to leave Europe to the Civil Service machine. One diplomat who has served both men says he suspects Mr Brown is entirely focused on winning the next British general election and will see every policy — domestic and foreign — through this prism.

‘Faced with a choice between Sarkozy and Merkel on one hand, or Dacre and Murdoch on the other, Gordon will go with the latter,’ he says. Mr Brown has so far been careful to cultivate a good relationship with Paul Dacre, who edits the Daily Mail. He will be in no hurry to start his premiership waging war against the newspapers he has spent so much time wooing, all of which are very likely to demand a referendum.