Alan Watkins: Mr Brown's twilight among the elves

The row about Mr Gordon Brown and his aides, or former aides – it seems safest to call them "former aides" – has now gone on for the best part of a week, and only now does it show signs of abating. The week after Easter has become more and more like the week between Christmas and the new year. Everything shuts down for seven days at least; or more like 11, if you count the days before Christmas.

Coincidentally, it was Mr Alastair Campbell who coined the formulation that 11 days was the maximum period during which the papers would run with a political story that was discreditable to the government before they turned their attention elsewhere. They may, however, direct their missiles at a different target, but still a segment of the political dartboard.

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The latest candidate for a bit of target practice is Ms Jacqui Smith. This is quite understandable. She is not up to the job. Even so, when Mr Brown was made Prime Minster, he was hailed in the public prints for his sagacity in appointing as Home Secretary not only a representative of all the old Labour virtues but also a woman. In fact, more home secretaries, Labour as much as Conservative, were quickly transformed into figures of fun or monsters, or, often, into combinations of both.

The only clear exceptions I have been able to think of have been R A Butler and Roy Jenkins, though I would give an honourable mention to Mr Jack Straw. Mr Straw is the Andre Gromyko of the people's party. He was the Russian foreign minister in the days of the Cold War who survived numberless changes of regime while also turning up somewhere in the group photograph.

But I do not want to write this week about home secretaries, still less about Ms Smith. The treatment of Ms Smith, deserved though it may have been, was, like the treatment of Mr Damian McBride – deserved though that undoubtedly was – a substitute for the real thing. It was an attack on Mr Brown.

In this I do not seek to defend Mr Brown in any way. In many respects he was a disastrous chancellor, bankrupting the National Health Service through his Private Finance Initiative, and reducing the London Underground system to a similar condition through the same means. He reinvented the means-test state, and what had been reviled in the interwar period was welcomed with enthusiasm in the decade after 1997.

He has never stood for the leadership of his party. However, it is a piece of mythology that Mr Tony Blair stood unopposed in 1994. He was opposed, unsuccessfully, by Mr John Prescott and Mrs Margaret Beckett. Mr Brown did not stand. He would probably have lost, but it would have been a close election. Even more probably, a lost election by Mr Brown would have brought less strife to the Labour Party than turned out to be the case.

Still it goes on. I was brought up on the dispute between the Bevanites and the Gaitskellites in the 1950s. This lasted the best part of a decade. The dispute between the Blairites and the Brownites has now lasted 15 years, and, as I say, it continues to go on.

Several former members of Mr Blair's government – Mr Stephen Byers, Mr Charles Clarke, Mr Frank Field, Mr Alan Milburn – have put in their two-penn'orth, with all of them casting aspersions on Mr Brown's methods of conducting his administration. Mr Field has gone so far as to write

that Mr Brown's position may even be imperilled before the election.

Mr Field's sin, or his political error, was to question the then chancellor's supremacy over the welfare state. Mr Field fancies himself greatly when it comes to the welfare state, understandably so. He is one of the few people who can fully grasp the subject. But he can be tiresome when he knows he is in the right. My feeling is that he really did not want to be a minister in the first place.

Mr Byers, Mr Clarke and Mr Milburn all enjoyed brief periods of favour as possible successors to Mr Blair. For one reason or another, they all (including Mr David Blunkett) bit the dust. Even Dr John Reid put in a brief appearance, taken up by the United States pollster who was for a time imported by the Newsnight programme to instruct us in how best to conduct our domestic politics.

Dr Reid disliked Mr Brown, as Mr Brown did Dr Reid, and Mr Brown was suspicious of Mr Field's expertise, while the others were not very serious rivals to Mr Brown at any stage. That was ordinary politics, not a conspiracy. Long ago, I advised the party to hold an internal election. I told them but they wouldn't listen. It was the expense, they said.

In the past week the world of politics seems to have been inhabited by a strange collection of mischievous elves and malignant goblins. Who exactly is Mr McBride? He turns out to be a Cambridge man and a former VAT inspector. He was apparently plucked from the twilight by Mr Brown to serve his purposes at the Treasury as his man-of-business, and has been by his master's side ever since, most recently after a muddying of the waters, about the precise allocation of responsibilities within No 10.

Then there is Mr Derek "Dolly' Draper, originally from Manchester University. He enjoyed a brief period of fame as Lord Mandelson's PR man – plain Peter Mandelson as he was in those days – when both of them were setting out on their journey through Mr Blair's first administration. Alas! Mr Draper was unwise enough to boast that he knew the only 17 important politicians in the land, all of whom were personal friends of his. He had to leave for California to train as a psychotherapist.

There is, as I understand the position, no college of psychotherapists – though there may shortly be one in this country. Accordingly, Mr Draper would not now be subject to any disciplinary processes which he might have to undergo if he had gratuitously damaged the mental health of Conservative politicians or their innocent spouses.

Quite why Mr Draper was briefly restored to the members' enclosure remains something of a mystery. He volunteered to write a political blog in the Labour interest, to counteract the influence of the more Conservatively inclined Mr Iain Dale and Mr Paul Staines ("Guido Fawkes"). He was invited to Chequers in November, which these days, as Lady Bracknell said, in another connection, is no guarantee of respectability. He collaborated with Mr McBride through defamatory and scurrilous emails intended for the projected new site which was revealed by Mr Staines to two Sunday papers.

Clearly, Mr Staines was paid something, as he related in last week's Spectator, and quite right too. But how do he and the rest of them – there are lots around – earn their cash for most of the time? If you write a political column, you have to write a certain number of words weekly, or more often, in exchange for a modest cheque.

A colleague of mine, younger but more experienced in modern technology, pondered the question and replied: "I don't really know how they earn their money. Some of them take advertising. But there isn't much money to be made in that." It is clearly better to stick to column-writing.

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