Matthew Norman: Sackings, sycophants and Jack Straw

With such lightning pace has he propelled himself towards the exit door marked "$150,000 per hour US lecture circuit" that even now, with Mr Tony Blair scheduled to reveal his departure timetable next week, there has been barely a moment to consider a future bereft of his leadership.

Myself, I think his going has been handled with indecent haste, for it seems like only yesterday that he broke the bad news. I remember the day so clearly. The Independent had yet to exist, of course, but there was a lovely picture feature in the News Chronicle about an actress, Thora Hird, winning the long jump (18-21 age group) at the Equity Games at Alexandra Palace.

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The crystal set was on the blink, but I managed to get it going, and over a light tea of powdered egg omelette and Woolton pie, we listened to Mrs Dale's Diary on the Home Service. Then the blow struck. "In a surprising development at Westminster," intoned an unusually sombre Alvar Liddell, "the Prime Minister Mr Blair has announced that, should he win the forthcoming general election, he will not seek a fourth term of office." We didn't hear the rest (the air raid sirens saw to that), and we didn't want to.

"Ooh, Dad, whatever shall we do without him?" sobbed the wife as we huddled together in the Anderson Shelter. "Now Mam, I know it's a shock," I sternly replied, passing her my hankie, "but you must try to be strong in front of the little 'un."

We must all try to be strong as the moment approaches, and must also look to the future, not the past, to consider the changed governmental landscape, because for Gordon Brown the choice of his first Cabinet could hardly be more crucial as he seeks to infuse an exhausted government with an instant veneer of freshness.

The most recent precedent of a man succeeding in the middle of a parliament found this easy. Few people knew who John Major was when he took over (it is rumoured that his wife, Norma, insisted he wore a name badge at home), and this anonymity was a priceless asset in creating the façade of novelty. Gordon, on the other hand, has been wearyingly familiar for an aeon, and cannot disown unpopular policies he co-created as Mr Major jettisoned the Poll Tax.

He could unleash one of those gruesome "100 days" whirlwinds of new initiatives, but he is far too canny to waste his best ammunition within a couple of years of a general election. So it is primarily in the complexion of his Cabinet that his instant opportunity to cast off the shackles of Mr Blair lies.

So little speculation has there been during this weird period of stasis, however, and so eerily quiet have the Treasury jungle drums been, that we can be sure of only one key appointment. The new Chancellor of the Exchequer will, of course, be Gordon Brown. The man who has spent a decade running every domestic department in Whitehall with the Stalinist ruthlessness of cliché isn't the man to yield control of anything, and will continue to run the economy via whichever cipher he prefers.

The weak-willed David Miliband would be the cunning choice. If he gave it to the Thunderbirds puppet, Gordon would appear magnanimously to be rewarding Mr Miliband for chickening out of a challenge, while really keeping the closest thing he has to a rival on a very short string. It might also amuse him to watch Mr Miliband take the rap for rising interest rates and, if it happens, a weakening, even crashing, property market.

Two decent bets are Alistair Darling, a man so sensationally dull that, during a stampede of wild Mustangs, his speeches could be used as makeshift Ketamin; and Ed Balls who, having helped him run the show for years, is also guaranteed to do what Gordon wants. There is a slight risk that the two would fall out, as PMs and Chancellors generally do, and if so it would be unsavoury watching Gordon scratching his Balls in public. A greater drawback is that appointing someone who has been an MP for only three years would look distinctly nepotistic.

So the smart money is on Jack Straw, the first politician ever to manage a campaign (Gordon's) that doesn't exist. One of the great survivors - he's harder to shift than herpes - Mr Straw is quiet, and utterly pliable, and is known to have good shorthand, so he seems perfect for a new PM who wants a personal assistant rather than a Chancellor.

Glancing at possible newcomers, Mr Ball's wife, Yvette Cooper, would have been in Cabinet years ago but for being perceived as an ardent Brownie, so she's a shoo-in. But such is the dearth of other talent in the middle ranks that Gordon may have to promote such human colonic irrigators as James Purnell and Andy Burnham - two hyper-sycophants who, until they recently realigned themselves, would have fought one another to the death to lick the drippings off Mr Blair's nose had he attended the House with a cold but no Kleenex.

Above all, it is the sackings that will define Gordon's epiphany, and here the scope is more promising. Dispensing with those Blairite ultras "Dr" John Reid and Tessa Jowell ought to be a gimme, the one being as endlessly repulsive as the other is monumentally useless. But such a scaredycat has Gordon always been before that you can imagine him sparing them through fear of sparking the civil war which Charles Clarke, Stephen Byers and Alan Milburn will doubtless hope to wage.

Margaret Beckett's sell-by date expired so long ago that, were she a supermaket orange, she would by now have grown a full head of hair and a full set of teeth. She will surely have more time to spend with her caravan, and my tenner is on the richly impressive Hilary Benn to replace her at the Foreign Office. Hazel Blears should be liberated to concentrate on becoming a full time understudy for doppelgänger Wee Jimmy Krankie, and as for Des Browne, who'd be sorely overstretched overseeing the armed forces of Camberwick Green, keeping him would send a message of inertia to have David Cameron doing somersaults of joy over his solar panels.

In a few weeks, when the trooping in and out of Downing Street takes place, we will have a clear indication of how Gordon Brown plans to keep Mr Cameron's feet on the ground and out of No 10. Until then, let us savour every last moment with the man determined to leave us in such a tearing hurry. I have kept the Daily Express published the day after he dropped that bombshell, and have it before me know. "Blair To Go!" screams the front page headline, above an advertisement for tickets to a Rob Wilton concert in Scarborough (one and eightpence farthing the pair). "Wants To Leave Crowd Wanting More, Says Star Who Won't Play Last Encore".

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