Forget Blair. It's Brown who should be driven out.

Blair is just window dressing: the electorally acceptable face, for the benefit of the floating voter, of what has actually been the Brown government.



Gordon Brown is the one who should be forced out.

With effectively Prime Ministerial power delegated by Blair, he has had sole charge of the UK's domestic politics since 1997. The responsibility for Britain's failing national security, shamefully inadequate defence procurement, disgusting health services, mass non-education and emasculated local government, including all Prescott's posturings and disastrous, anti-democratic meddlings, can be laid at the door of Number 11 Downing Street.

The government benches are packed with party time-servers and greasy-pole climbers who owe what will, one hopes, be their relatively short political careers to Blair. Blair bequeathed the almost total domestic political power which he derives from their supine presence, to Brown, while he postures on the international stage, burnishing his reputation as a 'world statesman' and basking in reflected glory as he rubs noses with much bigger figures than himself while, at home, Rome burns

This is the outcome of the infamous Granita Deal, the pact between Brown and Blair, sealed in a north London restaurant before Labour came to power. Brown was not an election winner but Blair was, so Blair would provide the pretty face to get Labour elected. He would stay out of domestic politics, for which he is very ill-equipped, and take on foreign policy, where the adulation, albeit superficial, which his vanity craves, is easily to be had. The more intelligent, though no wiser or moral Brown would become the de facto prime minister at home, the brooding power behind every Cabinet minister who wished to keep his or her seat in the inner sanctum.

Blair's vanity is almost immeasurable. At moments of public, national concern, like the death of a member of the Royal family, or a war, he would come centre stage, the face as appropriately composed as if he were trained by Lee Strasberg, to enunciate the mots justes. Positioning himself close enough to the Queen to all but outshine her on occasion, accompanied by his power-hungry wife whom he has allowed to be referred to as the First Lady, he has held the collective cameras and scribblers of Fleet Street in thrall. He has star quality - of the sort that Diana Dors and other Rank starlets had - and the political instinct to surround himself with sharp-minded spinmeisters and placemen who have helped keep him in office. But he is, in fact, politically hollow - empty. And empty vanity in an actor is powerful and dangerous. He has fooled himself, and our country, into war.

Brown, however, is not empty. This very solid Scottish Socialist of the old school - he is only 'New Labour' for electoral purposes, and he will stay that way for as long as necessary to remain in power - has nursed his social engineering agenda for a lifetime and he is very good at making his dreams come true. (All except one, perhaps.) He has raised taxes to an unbelievably high level, and the poor are worse off than they were before him, and he got away with it. He has wrecked the pension system, and got away with it. He has under-funded the military services and the home security services, and got away with it. He has hosed money all over his calculatedly vastly-expanded state payroll, without insisting on any improvement in results. He has announced the same funding for the same projects over and over again - in effect, lied - and claimed praise for 'investing in public services'. He plays games with our national finances that would get the financial director of a public limited company fired and perhaps even prosecuted.

Every statement by every Cabinet Minister, every Minister of State, has been preceded by a primary announcement by Brown of the policy in question. No-one is any doubt as to who is responsible for every jot and tittle of Britain's domestic agenda and strategies. Every minister knows it, and the electorate knows it.

Brown is a calculating social engineer whose primary aim has been to secure Labour's position in power indefinitely, at all and any cost. He has packed the Labour vote with almost one million additional state employees and almost three million extra welfare claimants. Every one of them beholden to Brown - and they know it.

This is called 'the Blair government'. I say it is not so. It is the Brown government.

Brown assumes, or perhaps he is beginning to fear that he can no longer assume, that he will succeed Blair, as agreed in the Granita Deal. But the plan is unravelling. Blair's foreign adventures, even more than Brown's appalling home administration, have made this government despised, even by its own backbenchers, and Blair himself is now hated both inside and outside his party.

Brown is joined to Blair at the hip in the eyes of the voters. They have been a double act for more than ten years. If there is any justice, this should prove to be Brown's undoing.

The Conservatives should disregard Blair. He is a man of straw. It does not matter when he goes. What matters is when Brown goes. And until he does, he should be attacked without mercy on all fronts for, on all fronts, he has abused his power, undermined Britain's security and, despite his wholly false claims to prudence and reponsibility, endangered its economic future.