Come in Mr Blair, your time’s up.

As Gordon Brown has secured the Labour party leadership he is guaranteed to be our next Prime Minister. This is no great surprise. For thirteen years we have expected Mr Brown to succeed Tony Blair, despite the Prime Minister’s constant attempts to try and block Brown’s succession.

The question now is why do we have to wait for six weeks before Mr Brown becomes PM? For a couple of years now, and especially since the Labour party conference last year, we have had to put up with a lame duck Prime Minister. The government is drifting along aimlessly just to satisfy one man’s vanity. Mr Blair got his wish of passing his tenth anniversary in office (and two days later the voters gave him a good kicking in the polls). But still he is hanging on. Today he is in Washington for a last meeting with President Bush, and then there will be an EU meeting and a G8 summit. These are important meetings, at which this country should be represented not by a lame duck, but rather by the man who will be leading us for the next couple of years.

Go away now Mr Blair, your time is up.

Brown has it in the bag?

My knowledge of, and interest in, Labour politics is pretty limited. As a result I have to struggle to interest myself in the Labour party’s leadership or deputy leadership elections. The problem is that this contest is going to decide who our next Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister are.

In the Gordon Brown versus John McDonnell contest you would have to suspect that Brown has it in the bag. McDonnell is a supporter of a number of left-wing causes, such as widespread nationalisation. On top of that he has troublemaking ‘previous’ as he was deputy to Ken Livingstone when the latter was leader of the Greater London Council in the 1980s. For the Labour party to choose him would be like the Tory party electing Iain Duncan Smith as leader……

Perhaps McDonnell will force Brown to move to the left slightly. Perhaps with John Reid leaving the government Brown will take the opportunity to scrap some of the illiberal measures that have come out of the Home Office of late. Maybe ID cards will be scrapped (with pressure on public spending, surely they would make a sensible cut?), although it says something about how much the Labour party has changed when opposition to ID cards is seen as left wing. But it would be a pure indulgence (and an act of madness) by Labour party activists if they were to elect McDonnell as leader.

Brown is hardly likely to shift the party or the government dramatically. There will probably be a change in emphasis and certainly of style. Yet, no one other than Brown has the chance to deliver the Labour party a fourth election victory. Such a victory will be much more difficult due to the resurgent Conservative party and with signs that Liberal Democrat’s are starting to loose ground – but this was always going to be the case.