BRITAIN: The mystery is solved. A senior minister was puzzling about how relaxed Gordon Brown - the UK's chancellor and prime minister-apparent - had been during last week's cabinet meeting. "He usually sits there as a brooding presence and very alone, now that all his allies have been picked off," says my source, "but last week he seemed very comfortable and relaxed."
The reason, of course, is that Brown knew he was about to be endorsed as the next Labour leader by the leading Blairites - Tessa Jowell, Patricia Hewitt and, more grudgingly, Charles Clarke. In return, Brown gave an interview to a Sunday newspaper promising not to betray Tony Blair's legacy.
The freshly rebetrothed pair are much in evidence in the seaside resort of Brighton at the party's annual conference this week, with more talk of pressing ahead, continuing reform and no turning back. But the conference will be, in the words of another cabinet minister, "a conference of shadows": none of the real questions facing Labour will be addressed.
They are, in random order, what is the date for the transition from Blair to Brown, will Brown really be a Blair mark two, and how on earth does Britain get out of the bloody mess that is Iraq?
The date of his going remains Blair's sole trump card and one he's not going to play yet. The Brown camp are rather grumpily resigned to the fact that it could be 2007 or it could be 2008. Yet a close ally of Blair insists that he does like to surprise, and talks enviously of the way the former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown caught everyone on the back foot when he announced his sudden departure. One rumour sweeping the Westminster undergrowth is that Blair might use his conference speech to announce the date; that looks unlikely.
Far more important than the date of the transition is what it will mean. Delegates arriving in Brighton were taken aback to see Brown insist in the Sunday Times that "the programme of reform and modernisation will continue when Tony steps down", a theme he echoed yesterday.
He wants more home ownership, more asset ownership. He wants - some claim - to be more Thatcherite than Blair. Well, up to a point. Brown had many audiences to address when he spoke to conference yesterday - party, business, media. He could not break free to articulate a vision that is truly distinctive without producing stories of a split with Blair and endangering the handover.
In a nutshell, Blair's aim for the conference is to straitjacket Brown, thus safeguarding his own legacy. That is why so many outriders for the Blair project have already been at work in the press warning against any move to the left. This, says one minister, is electoral nonsense, putting psephology at the service of ideology. "People are accused of being dinosaurs if they suggest the party goes anywhere but further to the right, and described as treacherous if they even try to have an open debate. How can we have a conversation about what happened at the election, and the future way forward, without acknowledging Iraq and the role of the prime minister?"
Ah yes, Iraq. A lot of work has been done to shove this howling, gory elephant off the conference floor and into some tiny basement meeting room, preferably without media access. Somehow they think debate can be kept to a carefully crafted four paragraphs in the prime minister's speech, stirring addresses from the foreign and defence secretaries on "not running away", and the almost inaudible sound of protesters beyond a barrier.
The bigger question is less about conference motions than about the government itself. With the breakdown of trust in Basra and almost every senior military man who is free to speak calling for an exit strategy, you would have thought that, behind the scenes, Labour ministers would be urgently discussing what to do now. This isn't happening. Last week's cabinet heard a report from John Reid. I summarise: "It's bad. But remember we are there under a UN mandate; we are not an occupying force. Our exit strategy is democracy. . . we will not cut and run." Nobody then put the obvious questions. Reid was thanked. In Blair's favourite phrase, they moved on. It seems surreal. Why did no one speak up? Because this has become an issue too big and painful to be talked about in front of the prime minister.
One leading cabinet minister admits to "tremendous unease". He believes the government has got off lightly because the debate has been so polarised . "There is a subterranean conversation, but it's quite difficult to talk openly. I don't know anyone who feels comfortable." This cannot continue for much longer. There's the vote on the Iraqi constitution next month and then the Iraqi election in December. If things are still no better by early next year, the public clamour for a new exit strategy will grow.
And so we return to the question of Blair's legacy, which hangs heavily over Brighton. If it is not to be Iraq, it has to be public-service reform. Hence his intense desire to see his domestic agenda outlive his own premiership.
When he insists that this legacy is safe with Brown, Blair is both stating an obvious point and fantasising. The obvious point is that Brown does believe in the market, is a reformer in the public services, and always has been. The Blairite fantasy is that a Brown premiership would be just more of the same.
It would not, as anyone who has watched the two men over the years will realise. It would be very different in political style: less exhibitionist and more respectful of the constitution and parliament; more focused on the people at the bottom of the heap; clearer and more open about equality of opportunity and redistribution. The economics would not alter - they are after all economics crafted by Brown - but their purpose would be more explicitly social democratic.
Brown's speech yesterday was in the usual code, but the message was clear, for those with ears to hear. Both Labour and Britain need renewal. Continuity, yes, but continuity with change too, in the service of "community" and "fairness" (key words those), not worship of the market. A party that was simply going to continue Blairism would not now have to "renew" itself. In the real world, however, it will. There has been an accommodation, but this Blair government has never, quite, been Brown's government. One day, Brown's government won't be Blair's. And that is why the chancellor smiles. - (Guardian service)