So Canny Gordon Was in the Driving Seat All the Time

The nine-year-old written deal between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, published in the Guardian yesterday, is a seminal document in the history of New Labour. The six-paragraph note did not, of course, contain the specific agreement we all suspected had been made at that famous Granita dinner. There were no phrases about letting Gordon take over as prime minister after Blair had served five years, or after Britain had joined the euro. It was not the deal we had always imagined. And yet the real thing is both blander and more interesting.

The most shocking revelation is this: Gordon Brown, an experienced politician and Tony Blair's closest political friend and ally, who has more or less lived in the same room as him for years, feels it necessary to have the Islington lawyer's promise in writing that "the fairness agenda - social justice, employment opportunities and skills" should be "the centrepiece of Labour's programme". Indeed, he is so suspicious that he deletes the words that "Tony is in full agreement with this" and substitutes the harder-edged "has guaranteed that this will be pursued" in his own handwriting, so burly and aggressive it almost seems to assault the paper.

So someone who knows Blair well and has watched his political views mature over the years was so unsure of Blair's commitment to the most basic notion of progressive politics that he feels the need to pin him down. It's as if Nye Bevan had had to get Clem Attlee to promise a little drop of socialism if he made it to power in 1945 - and get that promise in writing. Unthinkable! If fairness, jobs and justice were not to be central to a Labour government, one wonders what would have been - cosying up to Washington and attacking asylum-seekers?

If this is really how Brown has privately seen Blair, it explains a lot. It suggests that Brown's possessiveness over the whole welfare and equality agenda was not mere jealousy or a power kick, but was because he feared the prime minister would not bother, left to himself. Is Brown's disdain for Blair as a politician of the centre-left really so bottomless?

Given what has happened since, it is clear that Brown has acted as if he was the real heart of the government, driving relentlessly forward with his tax credits to help poorer working families, his assault on youth unemployment, the minimum wage and, rather belatedly, the huge injection of money into the NHS. Many people criticise the Brown style as Treasury micro-management, and it is certainly true that the maze of targets, reviews, performance indicators and form-filling bumph is dazing, perhaps for some public servants even demotivating.

But what the memo invites us to ask is what the past six years might have been like without Brown at the centre of things, driving forward redistribution. It is easy enough to imagine a Blair government without Brown doing some of the things the chancellor is now famous for - giving the Treasury independence over setting interest rates, or sticking to Tory spending plans for the first two years. They are just the sort of financially conservative, hyper-cautious acts that a clean-cut Blairite would favour. But it's the more important part of the agenda - the defence of the NHS as a single entity, a modernised version of the 1945 model, and the effort that has gone on unemployment and the working poor - that would not have happened without Gordon Brown.

The other striking thing about the memo, though, is that it is based on a lie. It starts from the premise that they had equal support as potential leaders nine years ago. They did not. As the analysis in yesterday's Guardian pointed out, at the time Blair was clearly ahead in all three sections of Labour's electoral college. The memo is then larded with pious words about the greatest possible party unity: "Gordon has taken, as he said he would, a decision which puts unity and teamwork above personal ambition." Is there not something slightly demeaning about this leaning over backwards to pat and flatter the future chancellor's bruised feelings? It is as if he is the ideological adult in the relationship, but the human child.

This, too, helps to explain much of what has happened since - on the one hand, Blair's constant frustration with Brown's gloom and yet, on the other, his apparently endless patience with the chancellor as he blocks and frustrates spending ministers. Back in 1994, Blair thought that the New Labour project would fall apart if the two of them fell out and in almost every way up to now he has acted as if he still thinks that.

But now? This takes us to the issue of this weekend, the euro. On the face of it, Brown has won yet another major victory in the relationship by facing down those pro-euro cabinet ministers who wanted an absolutely explicit timetable for entry to be agreed at Thursday's meeting, then published on Monday. Brown's brief statement afterwards was the throat-clearing triumphalist rumble of a man who feels he still has complete power over the process. He loudly committed himself to the notion that Britain should stay in the European Union ... which makes him no more Europhile than Iain Duncan Smith.

It is one thing for Brown to have taken charge of the national economy and the welfare state and the fairness agenda through what has been, in theory, the Blair government. As this paper's political editor, Michael White, wrote yesterday, no chancellor has "so successfully held the sitting prime minister at bay while poking his own nose into policies and practices throughout Whitehall". But it is another thing for the chancellor to swipe Blair's central dream of European leadership from under his nose. Were he to frustrate entry into the euro until Blair had quit Number 10, then the past two administrations would be the years of Brownism as much as Blairism. This, historians would say, was the first British government run, in crucial respects, from Number 11.

So what now? The anti-Brown forces in the cabinet believe that Blair's frustration will mean the euro decision is taken away from the Treasury, bit by bit, and passed to the cabinet where Blair has a majority. Tests will be assessed by all the ministers, and with the economic gobbledegook published and out of the way, it will be easier to have these arguments in public. All ministers will be expected, after Monday, to make a principled case for the euro. The Treasury nay-sayers will come to seem marginal and isolated.

Perhaps. But I notice another significant trend at the moment. Some of Brown's most trenchant private critics at cabinet level are changing their tune a little. He is winning warm praise for his intellect and grip of the euro issues, including from ministers who used to complain about him. This could be part of the "unity" camouflage New Labour is now hastily donning. But there is something else to it. Even Blair loyalists are starting to think about life on the other side of the coming election. And they see Gordon Brown succeeding.

Maybe there is yet another piece of paper in a bottom drawer, with pencil and biro amendments, which makes this all explicit. I rather doubt it, though. The deepest understandings are not written, and may not even have been clearly spoken. The unspoken assumption behind this sheet of paper was that there would be no "Blair government"; but there would be a Blair-Brown government. And so it has come to pass.