Deborah Orr: These two canny Scots, as they celebrate 100 days in power, have much in common

Has 100 days always been some amazingly significant political anniversary, without me noticing it? Or has this most meagre of centenaries achieved exaggerated resonance in the service of 24-hour rolling news. If the latter is the case, then one can certainly see why it has caught on. Both the British premier, Gordon Brown, and the Scottish first minister, Alex Salmond, after controversial manoeuvrings into their top jobs, are now basking in voter approval, each considerably more secure in their positions now, polls suggest, than they were a few short months ago. You can't really tell much after 100 days, but that hasn't stopped joy in the greatness of our new leaders from being unconfined.

Brown, famously, has been doggedly planning his first 100 days for something like 4,000 days, so it would have been a pretty poor show if he hadn't managed to lay a few little explosions of crowd-pleased pyrotechnics to dazzle and delight us all on the way. But there's no denying that he's been lucky, if that's the word for it, as well.

Related articles

• Leading article: Mr Salmond and his subtle cause of independence
• Scottish Labour Party leader set to resign
• Salmond's White Paper puts Brown on defensive

There was a good cartoon in The Glasgow Herald recently, which carried a caption suggesting that fire, flood, then pestilence, had been a marvellous start for a son of the manse. That's almost creepily true. Brown has responded with the right measure of laid-back and confident authority to the unforeseen events that have littered the early weeks of his coup, not least because he's seen them all at close quarters before. But one suspects as well that there might have been rather more critical analysis of the stuff he'd had up his sleeve all along, were it not for this thrilling run of near disasters.

Because there's been something almost a bit unsettling about the presumable provenance of some of Brown's early gambits. We all know perfectly well that Brown has been not just holding the purse-strings all along, but playing a complicated game of cat's cradle with them too. So it's vaguely disturbing to consider what might be implied by the sudden release of great wodges of cash that previously seemed sternly unavailable.

The very first signal of Brown's change of direction, for example, was his early emphasis on the importance of the creation of new housing and particularly social housing. I couldn't agree with him more that this ought to be a massive priority. But I'm also aware that Brown has been quietly hinting for years that he personally is just about to sort this out at any second. The awful suspicion is that he has been hoarding this party-political capital for a long time, prepared to stand by watching as the pool of housing available to the poor, the young and the vulnerable became smaller and more degraded by the day, while concurrently the credit boom fuelled by housing inflation helped to create the impression of lasting prosperity. The political advantages of such a waiting game are clear. But the moral authority of such calculated machinations is more questionable.

The same goes for the increase in defence spending. Whatever one's opinion of the military adventures that Blair and Bush have engaged in, the underfunding of operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the stubborn resistance of the Ministry of Defence to the financing of post-combat difficulties among members of the armed forces, has been ignominious. Again, the evidence of sudden largesse engenders the queasy supposition that there has been some rather ruthlessly tactical saving-up going on.

Perhaps such disquiet is inevitable, an unavoidable consequence of the strange position of unchallenged leader-in-waiting that Brown has been occupying for a decade. Perhaps, too, it all dovetails rather too neatly with the critical noise that Blairites sowed around Brown for years. The weird Blair-Brown leadership went on too long.

Still, Brown's inability ever to present himself as an entirely new broom contrasts hugely with the honeymoon period currently being enjoyed by Alex Salmond. Since devolution, the Scottish Executive scored major success mainly in its awesome and unerring ability to cheese-off its own electorate with its lazy, self-aggrandising complacency. Salmond's minority government has been effortlessly able to style itself as a breath of fresh air in a manner that is denied almost by definition to Brown.

Further, of course, the situation is providing Brown with one of his most intractable political headaches. The Brown bounce might be more pertly elastic than even he could possibly have hoped for. But it is conspicuously absent in Scotland, where voters have hardened in their new-found dislike of Labour rather than softened. The irony is much remarked upon. For the first time in eons a Scot is running the country, and the people posing the greatest threat to a revitalised majority for his government in the next election are the Scots.

If Brown was hoping that Salmond would himself remove the wheels from this troublesome bandwagon, by reminding the Scottish electorate that above all else, Salmond stood for an independent Scotland, them yesterday's White Paper, promised as part of the SNP manifesto, would have disappointed him.

Salmond had backed away from promising to call for a referendum on Scottish independence even before the election, in the shrewd knowledge that such a promise would not gain his party enough votes to win. He backed off even further yesterday, by calling instead for "a national conversation" about the future of Scotland that would consider the various options for further devolution that are available to the country - including the solution I favour myself, which is a greater measure of fiscal autonomy, wherever that may lead. Here is consensus politics at its most absurd, and also at its most emolliently civilised.

Salmond occupies a tremendously interesting position in British politics at the moment, since his fragile hold on power has been gained in spite of, rather than because of, his animating political conviction. The Scots may like having the SNP running its devolved government, and many more Scots, for the present at least, appear to like it than the number who actually voted for it. But no more Scots, despite this, have any appetite for independence. They just want a change from Labour that isn't Liberal Democrat or Tory, and preferably one that doesn't ruin everything by boring them with too much talk about independence.

Obviously, this is not what Brown wants. He wants what Labour leaders always want, which is a Scotland that always, always delivers a shot in the arm to Labour's electoral ambitions. Funnily enough, Brown's own strategy for retaining this bank of reliable voters matches neatly with Salmond's. Brown is signalling that he is willing to offer more devolution in order to stave off the threat of independence, and Salmond is signalling that he will be happy to accept more devolution, even if he has to mothball his desire for sovereignty. "What next," Little Englanders could be excused for seething, "A Brown-SNP coalition in Westminster?" To which, in these awkward times, one might be tempted to reply: "Never say never."

d.orr@independent.co.uk

More from Deborah Orr