A week – as they say – is a long time in politics. As they clock up another New Year, the old stones of Downing Street must be musing to themselves that they have rarely seen as much change as in the last one.
A year ago this was a pulsating palace of light, whose windows were always ablaze and in and out of whose ever open door sluiced a gay tide of pop stars and poets and Italian media mogul Presidents accused of corruption and all the paraphernalia of London and international glitterati.
A year later Camelot has turned into Gormenghast. All is sepulchral gloom. A single guttering candle shines in some high casement window as our son-of the manse, workaholic Prime Minster pours over the nation’s accounts, or some abstruse political text which only academics have read, or maybe contemplates whether he really could, as Gladstone before him, bring in a regime for counting the number of postage stamps his Ministers use.
It is not, for sure, a joyless place. But it is now a serious place.
Gordon’s style is serious, too. Gone is the sofa and fireside the chat. Now we do business. And it is based on facts. Tony used to view meetings as group therapy sessions and then, often in a way which was quite feline, but almost always by a process no-one could quite work out, he would arrive at his view.
Gordon has a view before he starts. It is not one lightly formed. He has studied it; he has read the books; he has listened to the experts; he has gone off into the wilderness to eat locusts and honey (or in his case his cottage in Fyfe with a trunkful of books) and he has returned, not with an idea, but with an opinion. I was amazed when he asked me to join his cabinet. Actually we talked briefly and very courteously about his kind proposal and my brief reply. But we talked extensively about the battle against international terror. And I didn’t have to explain anything to him. He had already read all the books I had read. He had already reached the conclusions I had reached. He was already ahead of me.
But knowing is not the same as governing.
There also has to be magic in government – and even mystery – and, nowadays a lot of showmanship, too. Tony was a master magician, who could always manage the mystery and excelled at the showmanship. Gordon is not good at any of these. We will see in the next year whether this really matters and if so how much.