Brown Needs to Apologise, and Blair to Call Off the Dogs

These days leadership campaigns start on the lifestyle pages and in the glossy magazines. Alan Johnson isn't declaring that he's ready to fight to be the next prime minister - no, you'll see beagles on the moon before that - but hey, he's certainly ready to open up new painful details about his early years and his successful struggle out of poverty. John Hutton contemptuously brushes aside the very idea that he might be about to enter the lists. But hey, just let him detain you with the story of his absent father.

Alan Milburn is dusting down his council-house years. As for John Reid, he is happy to remind us of his humble origins while giving a genial interview or two about the need for a full debate, not deals in closed rooms. And I think we can all guess what that means. However nauseating this "I've suffered more than he has" contest may be, it's a fairly safe assumption that any minister talking about his childhood is considering standing for the leadership of the Labour party against Gordon Brown.

This explains why Tony Blair's desperate attempt not to mention the leadership war yesterday is so risible, and so doomed. It is too late. The battle for the succession has started. Blair is trapped by what he said in the past. He does not "resile" from previous statements, such as that Brown would make a brilliant prime minister. But he can't quite bring himself to repeat them, not after the embittering events of the past weeks.

He is like a grizzled old boxing promoter wondering which of the anti-Brown contenders shows the most promise. As things stand now, they would all be on the canvas with a broken nose seconds after taking on the heavyweight champ. But things can change. A steady two months of bad polling about Brown, the odd further mistake by a supporter and - what then? The truth is that, in his heart, Blair would love to see Brown beaten and humiliated.

All sides are keeping to the agreed "don't mention the war" formula, but any sense that the Blair and Brown camps had started to work together was blown away by the preparations for this Manchester conference. The rival gangs are stalking the hotel lobbies and restaurants, just as they have at the seaside year after year. Blair and Brown interviews and speeches have been prepared and delivered without either having any idea what the other would say. In that sense, it's as bad as ever.

The question is really whether the Blair camp is determined to try to stop the chancellor at all costs. After so many years, they now feel it is their turn to fall silent and damage Brown by failing to say supportive things, by not quite spelling out Blair's views on the transition and by briefing about awful private polls. The more worried Brown looks, the happier they will be. In a strange way, the prime minister may actually be enjoying this conference.

Yet, whatever his heart tells him, his head must know that this is a lunatic strategy. Family wars are always the worst, and this would be reformers against reformers, New against New, fratricidal in every sense. Brown's supporters fear a three-pronged strategy: first vicious briefing and personal attacks against the chancellor, then pointing to the polling that - surprise, surprise - shows Brown isn't much liked after all those nasty comments about him, and finally a declaration that Brown can't win against Cameron.

The big problem with this strategy for Blairites is that their desperate search for a candidate is failing to throw up anyone likely to trump Brown, either with the electorate or the party. And remember it is the Labour party - not the press, the pollsters or the bookies - that elects the Labour leader. So all their strategy is achieving is to damage the reputation of the man most likely to lead Labour into the next election. Result? Labour truly falls apart. Scores more Labour seats become unwinnable.

Eventually Blair will probably realise this, and call off the dogs. But does he still have the authority to do so? People such as Johnson, Reid and Hutton are big enough to make their own decisions but, even so, a clear and forceful endorsement of Brown by Blair would stop a bitter contest. It would be painful for him, but then it was painful for Brown to do something similar 12 long years ago.

Yet that would not be enough by itself to pull Labour round from the turmoil it is in. Brown is well aware of the challenge he faces with today's speech. He has to apologise for his supporters' role in recent events. He should not give us any saccharine passages about how much he adores Blair, because nobody would believe a word of it; but he should make a generous, honest assessment of their relationship, which has brought so much good for the country as well as providing a living for media psychologists. We can expect to hear Brown's assessment of his own politics, focusing on his desire to restore trust in politicians and to share decision-making. We may even hear him being a little self-mocking about the attempts to persuade us he's really a cool dude who likes to listen to pop tunes on his iPod.

He has to talk like a self-confident national leader, eschewing the codewords and the pounding lists of achievements, which may work well in the hall but turn off the public. And after he has done all this, he has to go round and offer the hand of friendship, and even a private apology, to many of those he has fallen out with over the years.

The stakes could not be higher. There is no reason for Labour to tear itself apart: the real differences are not so great that we can talk of an ideological divide at the heart of the party. Yet it is very close to meltdown. Brownites have to be a little humble and apologetic. But the Blairite ultras are the ones who really have to look in the mirror and ask whether they mean all the worthy rhetoric about not taking voters for granted - or whether, after all this time, the temptations of revenge and back-stabbing are just irresistible.

It is a moment, in short, when we will see how much self-discipline the Labour government has left. David Cameron has his own troubles, and in different circumstances we would be hearing a lot about the new Tory divide over taxation. But this week he looks a very lucky, well-placed man. He could be about to move into the kind of settled, decisive lead that cannot be clawed back. As New Labour's tribes circle one another in Manchester, they should see his face smiling from every shadow and bar-room mirror.