Brown is his own Chancellor

Who runs the Treasury? asks Ben Brogan a propos of Downing Street's leaking of today's partial U-turn on capital gains tax.

"No one seriously expected the new Prime Minister to surrender all interest in his old department, but recent weeks suggest Mr Brown still has an office there," he says.

I'm not sure Ben or anyone else should be terribly surprised by this. History shows there are two sorts of Chancellors - those who have their own independent powerbase, like Denis Healey, Ken Clarke and Brown himself, and those who owe their power entirely to the Prime Minister, such as Anthony Barber, Norman Lamont, and Mr Darling.

From this list it will be seen that the more successful Chancellors tend to be the former variety, which bodes ill for Mr Darling's tenure. I continue to take the view that Jack Straw would have been a more sensible appointment.

Is there more to Clegg than meets the eye?

I have to say that Nick Clegg went up in my estimation today after reading this story in which he pledges to lead a public campaign of law-breaking against the Government's ID card scheme.

"If the legislation is passed I will lead a grassroots campaign of civil disobedience to thwart the identity cards programme ... I, and I expect thousands of people like me, will simply refuse ever to register," he said.

Clegg has spent most of this leadership campaign giving progressives like me reasons not to vote for him - all the talk about the Lib Dems needing to stop "looking inward" is really just code for saying the party needs to travel lighter in ideological terms.

But if he really is prepared to become the first party leader in living memory to go to jail for his principles, then perhaps he is not quite the identikit member of the "political class" that on the surface he seems to be.

As I pointed out in my Saturday column last week, Gordon Brown's pretensions to be a champion of "liberty" will be pretty hollow unless he is prepares to reconsider the ID card scheme.

Loath as I am to urge him to nick any more ideas off the Tories, David Cameron's mob have put themselves on the right side of both popular opinion and liberal opinion on this one - two things that rarely seem to coincide.

Of all the crazy ideas put forward during the Blair era, this is the very first that Brown should have dispensed with in his determination to put some distance between him and his predecessor.

By comparison, supercasinos and the law on cannabis are pretty small beer.

Blair's last reshuffle

More fascinating stuff today from Anthony Seldon's new "Blair Unbound" biography currently being serialised in The Times. Today's excerpt reveals he planned to make Charles Clarke Foreign Secretary in his last big reshuffle in May 2006, but was persuaded against it following Clarke's mishandling of the row over the deportation of foreign prisoners.

Seldon goes on to claim that Blair then formulated a plan to give the job to David Miliband, but got cold feet at the last minute before settling on the third choice, Margaret Beckett.

The fascinating question here is why he decided not to promote Miliband, a move which, according to Seldon, Blair himself believed would have "renewed" the government.

Perhaps it would. But what it would also have done, of course, was hugely destabilised the government, in that the appointment to a major office of state of such an obvious potential rival to Gordon Brown for the succession would have been viewed as a declaration of war by the Brownites.

The Brownites would then have pushed harder to get the Prime Minister out, and would quite possibly have succeeded in removing him earlier than June 2007.

Seldon says that Blair decided against Miliband in the end because he had only been in the Cabinet a year, but this doesn't really ring true. I think he decided that the appointment would simply be too divisive, and opted for Beckett as the safe option.

The other interesting counterfactual question is whether, had the debacle over the deportation of foreign prisoners not happened and Clarke gone to the Foreign Office as originally planned, would he have been able to mount a successful challenge for the top job?

What it all goes to show is that, even though the Brown coronation ultimately assumed an air of historical inevitability, it never really was. Any number of circumstances could have led to a different outcome - these are just two of them.