Brown hits the right note

This afternoon's acceptance speech by Gordon Brown was no mere formality, but a significant pointer to the way he intends to govern Britain. "Wherever we find injustice...there must we be" was not a bad opening mission statement for a left-of-centre premier.

For me, three things stood out in the speech. First, the acknowledgement that the need for more affordable housing has risen to near the top of the political agenda and the announcement that the Housing Minister will in future attend Cabinet. I am going to take a punt and predict that this post will go to the man who helped put the issue on the agenda, Jon Cruddas.

Second, the new Prime Minister's pledge that the NHS will be his "immediate" priority. This is a recognition of the state of crisis affecting some parts of the service and the fact that Labour has not necessarily reaped the political dividends here for all its huge investment in health. It does not bode well for the current Health Secretary, Patricia Hewitt.

Thirdly, Mr Brown's call for a "new constitutional settlement." I always believed that reviving the stalled constitutional reform agenda would be a key element of any Brown premiership and I expect this to address, among other things, reform of Parliament, local government, and the voting system, with Jack Straw in overall charge.

A last word about Tony Blair, whose short contribution was also significant. He said that in successfuly staging a stable and orderly transition, Labour had once again proved itself a mature party of government.

How very true that is. Labour has avoided the bloodletting and recrimination that accompanied the fall of Margaret Thatcher, and against the backdrop of the complexity of the Blair-Brown relationship, and all the inevitable tensions that accompany the exercise of great power, that is a very considerable achievement indeed.

It wasn't just the womens' vote

Okay, so we got it wrong. Most of the pundits who have followed Labour's deputy leadership election contest over the past few weeks were split between predicting a victory for Hilary Benn, who came a bad fourth, and Alan Johnson, pipped at the post in second. Few anticipated a win for Harriet Harman, although in retrospect, perhaps we should have realised that what Gordon wants, Gordon usually gets in the end.

Some will no doubt be crowing over the fact that Guido was one of those who tipped Johnson, but at least he's had the good grace to acknowledge it. And having myself predicted a final ballot between Benn and Cruddas, with Benn emering victorious by 55-45, I am hardly in a position to talk.

Initial reaction to Harriet's victory tended to focus on the fact that party members clearly wanted a woman deputy, which is not surprising given that she made that her main campaign pitch. But I don't think that was the only reason she won.

What I think it demonstrates is that there was a natural majority in the party for the viewpoint most clearly represented in this contest by Harman and Jon Cruddas - that not everything the government has done has been perfect, and that the War in Iraq, in particular, was very far from being so.

In retrospect, the key moment of the campaign was the televised debate on Question Time, when Harman called for a government apology for the war and urged her supporters to make Jon Cruddas their second preference. From that moment on, there was never any doubt in my mind that one of them would make the last two.

I thought it would be Cruddas who would be ahead, and that Harman's votes would transfer to him. In the event, it turned out to be the other way round. Either way, it shows the desire for, at the very least, a change of tone on Iraq, and at the appropriate time, a change in policy too.

The final reckoning

My Saturday column in today's Newcastle Journal represents my final word (for now!) on Tony Blair, his place in history, and why Andy Marr was right to say "We're all Thatcher's children now." The concluding paragraphs also pay homage to Tim Ireland, for a great idea.

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And so the turbulent premiership of Tony Blair draws to an almost eerily peaceful conclusion, the first since Harold Wilson's to end neither in electoral defeat nor in an internal party coup.

By this time next week, we will doubtless be poring over the entrails of Labour's deputy leadership election result, to be announced tomorrow, and Gordon Brown's first reshuffle, due on Wednesday.

The new Cabinet line-up may well feature up to 10 new names, but they will apparently include neither that of Lord Ashdown nor any other Liberal Democrat politician.

Mr Brown's attempt to get the Lib Dems to leap aboard his new political bandwagon is one of the more extraordinary episodes in modern politics and will keep commentators and future historians busy for many a year.

But that's for another day and another column. For this week, it would be almost indecent not to focus on the outgoing Prime Minister.

It was appropriate that the broadcaster Andrew Marr's televised magnum opus, A History of Modern Britain, should conclude in this, Mr Blair's penultimate week as premier.

As political editor of the BBC, Marr was famously close to New Labour, informing the great British public on the day of David Kelly's death that Alastair Campbell was a great guy who would be devastated by the tragedy.

But Marr the historian seems to have acquired a new objectivity, and the last two programmes in particular would not necessarily have made comfortable viewing for Mr Blair.

In the first, broadcast a week ago last Tuesday, he charted the immense changes of the Thatcher years, concluding that, for good or ill, it was she who shaped the Britain we now live in.

By comparison with that, the man who was hailed as having had the most impact on the way we live now during the Blair era was not the Prime Minister himself, but Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web.

Mr Blair has, according to is detractors, long been obsessed with his place in history, and to be fair to them, he has done little over the past three years to counter the suggestion.

So where, in the end, will he stand in that pantheon of past Prime Ministers whose portraits line the staircase at No 10, and where his own portrait will be placed next Wednesday?

Well, there are some Prime Ministers who were clearly in the category of abject failures, who will be remembered primarily for getting the key question of their premierships wrong

Neville Chamberlain, for Munich and the failure to re-arm, and Sir Anthony Eden for Suez, are the two 20th century premiers who fall most clearly into this group.

Then there are others who were quite competent administrators and who did some things right, but who were defeated by events or let down by the people they should have been able to count on.

Jim Callaghan, destroyed by the very unions whose cause he had always championed, and John Major, who endured five years of guerrilla warfare from the Maastricht rebels, spring to mind here.

Next there are the likes of Harold Wilson and Stanley Baldwin, men who didn't change a great deal but, through skilful political management, kept their parties together and won more elections than they lost.

And there are those such as Edward Heath whose otherwise troubled premierships were redeemed by a single great achievement - in his case, taking Britain into Europe.

The very top rank, though, is reserved for those who were either called upon to lead the nation in its darkest days of war, or who irreversibly shifted the political consensus in peacetime.

In the past 100 years, there have been just four of these: David Lloyd George, Sir Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher.

Where does Mr Blair rank in all this? Well, to my mind, the two past premiers he most closely resembles are the Liberal Herbert Henry Asquith, and the Tory Harold Macmillan.

Asquith led a reforming government which lost its way a bit, became embroiled in a rather difficult war, and was finally elbowed aside by his ambitious Chancellor, Lloyd George

Meanwhile Macmillan was the first true master of spin, who told the electorate they had "never had it so good" while generally doing little to change the country's overall direction.

Both Asquith and Macmillan will go down as premiers who were neither a disaster, nor who entered the top rank, and that, in the final analysis, is where I would place Tony Blair.

Mr Blair's admirers have always argued that he was a consensus-shifter like Mrs Thatcher - that by shifting the Labour Party to the right, he was able to shift the overall centre of political gravity to the left.

That may well have been the idea, but we have in fact ended up in a situation in this country in which, while a right-wing party may be able to "talk left," a left-wing one has to "act right" to prove its fitness to govern.

This is the conundrum Labour found itself in during the 1980s and 1990s, and it is still essentially the same conundrum that faces Mr Brown today as he prepares to take power.

As Andrew Marr pointed out, we in this country are not Blair's children, or Major's, or Callaghan's. Like it or not, we are all still Thatcher's children really.

Fans of the spoof gangster movie Bugsy Malone will remember the song that goes: "We could have been anything that we wanted to be, with all the talent we had. No doubt about it, let's shout about it, we're the very best at being bad."

Well, to make the last bit an epitaph for the Blair premiership would be a trifle unfair. Although his government has done some bad things, there have been badder ones.

But with all his talent - and public goodwill - Tony Blair really could have been anything that he wanted to be, really could have been up there with Clem, Sir Winnie and the Iron Lady.

He will have a very long retirement in which to ponder that lost opportunity.