John Rentoul: Brown will make Blair's sofa government look like a model of open accountability

What will Gordon do? One of the Chancellor's great achievements is that this question does not dominate politics, less than six months from his near-inevitable succession. The result is that, despite a certain amount of pre-emptive disappointment, Gordon Brown is regarded as a cross between the Promised Land and the Great Unknown. The Brown government is still a place where the rough places shall be plain and everything shall be possible.

Let us take one example, entirely at random. What will Gordon do about road pricing? Here is a policy drawn up by his most senior lieutenant in the Cabinet and possible successor as Chancellor, Alistair Darling. Just before Darling was moved from Transport to Trade and Industry, he committed the Government in principle to using satellite tracking to charge drivers for using congested roads. The Brown faction says the Blair faction sabotaged the policy by opening the 10 Downing Street website to email petitions. One against road pricing attracted 1.8 million "signatures", which represents an awful lot of people even if, like a trade union block vote, it does not actually represent 1.8 million people.

Douglas Alexander, Brown's most junior lieutenant in the Cabinet, who succeeded Darling at Transport, was furious with the "prat" in No 10 who thought up the e-petition idea, even if he didn't actually use the word. The alleged prat, better known as Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, head of the Prime Minister's Strategic Communications Unit, said, through a source close to him, that the petition was a "sign of the success of the website". The source added: "The idea that these people would not have had these views if the Downing Street website did not exist is nonsense."

On this Wegg-Prosser is absolutely right and Alexander absolutely wrong. Road pricing is a shining example of what is wrong with the way Brown and his allies do things. The Chancellor is known for his stealth taxes, but they are part of a larger pattern: Gordon Brown is addicted to stealth politics.

Road pricing is the best theoretical way to deal with congestion. Putting a price on a scarce resource, in this case road space, would ensure it is used most efficiently, spreading traffic to less busy roads and less busy times. But people don't like paying for something that used to be free. So Darling and Alexander seem to have hoped that, if the policy were adopted gradually and unobtrusively, the voters would get used to it eventually.

The Blairite model of politics is more active: it is to sniff out the popular mood and engage with it, to go looking for trouble, in other words. That is why the e-petitions may look like a naïve experiment in participatory democracy that has blown up in Blair's face (the next most popular is one calling for the abolition of inheritance tax). In fact, they are opportunities, not problems, as Alastair Campbell used to say. Downing Street has inflated an airbag that will save Brown from injury when the "best theoretical policy" collides with electoral reality.

Brown's people adopted the "right" policy, but they failed to win the argument for it. That process began only after the e-petition, and characteristically, it was Blair who began it. Last week, he interviewed Richard Hammond, the Top Gear presenter and a leader of the revolt, in a Downing Street podcast run as an exclusive in the Daily Mirror. Hammond thought he was the interviewer, but Blair said: "What is the alternative to dealing with this congestion? I mean if we swap seats for a moment, and you come into my seat and I am sitting in yours, what is the answer to the congestion?"

Hammond was thrown. "Oh, if I came here with an answer to congestion I would be ..." Blair finished his sentence: "Prime Minister."

It was an adroit and persuasive plea to consider the options, but I doubt that the argument for road pricing can be won. The winners are too diffuse and the losers too defined for the policy to be viable in a democracy. (It is not as if it is even green: the aim is to put more cars on the road network without causing gridlock.) But Blair has saved Brown from finding that out during an election campaign.

One thing Gordon will do, then, is drop road pricing. It was stealth politics, and does not work. There are signs Brown is learning. Last week, he announced a public sector pay squeeze. Even if millions of state employees do not like it, it was bold and it was right.

The way he did it, though, was extraordinary. I am told the Chancellor's meeting with the ministers concerned broke up on Wednesday without agreement. He announced his decision at Cabinet the next morning, before going straight to the Commons. One minister, realising he had been bounced, was reduced to texting his officials with the news during the Cabinet meeting. You think Blair is presidential? Brown's style of decision-making makes sofa government seem a model of open accountability.

Tomorrow, Brown will join Blair and John Hutton, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, at the launch of a push to get people off welfare and into work. It all sounds much like the "unremittingly New Labour" policies Blair promised at the last election.

Just to add to the sense of ideological disorientation, Blair discovered last week that for 10 years he has been a Labour prime minister after all. At his monthly news conference he tried to explain to bored journalists who lazily believe the opposite that the gap between rich and poor has narrowed since 1997.

The cries of betrayal cannot be long coming. Already the Labour left complains that Brown is no different from Blair. Soon after Brown takes over, it will decide he is worse, probably at about the time that Brown has to rely on Conservative votes to get the replacement of Trident through the Commons. Then Brown will be forced to give up stealth politics, and forced to court, with Blairite vigour, car-driving voters who believe in strong national defence. Which may pose a problem for David Cameron, because his strategy is based on painting Brown on the left of Blair, while he is the true heir.

Then we will have Cameron saying he can achieve Blairite ends by being more rigorous in following through. While Brown will seem more Blairite than Blair in demanding efficiency in public services, "ending welfare as we know it" and being tough on crime and national security.

Blairism. Get used to it.

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