Matthew Norman: With enemies like these, who needs friends?

So that's that, then. It was pretty much in the bag anyway, needless to say, but any hint of an iota of lingering doubt about Gordon Brown's succession was obliterated this week by The Unlikely Lads of Westminster. There may have been a more bizarre political double act than Alan Milburn and Charles Clarke in recent times (the Tory leadership election pairing of Ken Clarke and John Redwood comes to mind), and there has certainly been a unsightlier coming together of colleagues. Not that we ever saw John Major and Edwina Currie in flagrante, of course, but the imagination will suffice.

Never in memory have we been treated, however, to such a display of spite and thwarted ambition cloaked in the tattered rags of altruistic concern for party and country as on Wednesday, when the Milburn-Clarke Axis of Irrelevance fired a series of blanks at Gordon Brown while claiming merely to be launching a new website (www.the2020vision.co.uk for what it's worth; and at most it's worth nothing) designed to provoke debate about the future of government policy.

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The briefest glance at the site's comment board offers a flavour of the rarefied policy discussions to come. Sandwiched between congratulatory messages from such fellow anti-Gordon militants as Frank Field and Peter Mandelson comes this, from crazybass: "It is about time you built more prisons and got the scum off our streets, people are scared to walk them at night ..."

As for Hilary Armstrong, such a fervent proponent of internal free speech in her previous cabinet job as Chief Whip, she wrote: "The Labour Party has never been scared of debate." Which will come as news to Walter Wolfgang, the octogenarian refugee from Hitler's Germany manhandled out of a party conference under anti-terrorism legislation.

"You both did well on Newsnight," runs another contribution, and that's a point we might wish to argue in the spirit of unshackled debate so unexpectedly coursing through New Labour's veins. In my eyes, they did not do well. Mr Milburn, resembling as always an unusually unctuous used car salesman turned motivational speaker freshly returned from a personal grooming course at a San Diego health farm, spouted "future, not the past" gibberish from his Compendium of Clichés Too Facile Even For Tony Blair (Millbank Press, £3.99 from all good bargain basements).

Mr Clarke, who has made such impressive headway in his quest to pass for Frank Dobson's homeless older brother, at least avoided such timeless gems as "The party that doesn't talk about the future has no future." Even so, he made a sensational chump of himself in refuting Jeremy Paxman's suggestion that all this website guff (I paraphrase slightly) might have some vague connection to a last-ditch effort to prevent the Chancellor moving next door.

It is at moments such as this that the Newsnight viewer lapses into a fantasy in which Paxo roots around under his desk for the studio polygraph. When the pair then claimed that Gordon Brown was delighted by their intervention, the fantasy developed to incorporate electrodes, miswired to send a sharp burst of current through its metal clips; and attached not, as convention dictates, to the temples, but to four pendulous gonads.

But on reflection it struck me that, albeit unwittingly, they were right. Gordon should be delighted. After all, with enemies like these, who needs friends? If this pair of rancorous buffoons (aided by Mr Milburn's Commons-misleading sidekick Stephen Byers) constitutes the mightiest anti-Gordon rearguard the Downing Street bunker can muster, he has nothing to fear. These two - the one sacked from the Home Office for incompetence; the other humiliatingly retired from the fray while screwing up Labour's last election campaign - are political ghosts, abject failures suffused with frustrated ambition and driven by undisguised bile towards a titanic figure who, for all his serious failings, could crush them both with a hand and still have thumb and index finger free for a game of darts.

If the Milburn-Clarke project were less laughable, one could speculate about the motives behind it. If it is intended to flush out David Miliband, how could his candidacy's apparent genesis in it do anything but harm it? If it is an attempt to blackmail Gordon into publicly committing himself to "Blairite" domestic policy, where' s the logic in that, when the chief architect of that policy is Gordon himself? Or is it just the last throw of the dice from two disappointed men who know their only chance of returning to Cabinet is under an alternative PM?

Perhaps there is an element of all three, but it's not worth the effort of closer analysis because really this is just a game. We know this because, in his website statement, Charles Clarke writes: "Politics is not a game" - and this is such an untruthful man that the safest thing to do, when seeking to interpret him, is simply reverse whatever he says.

When I wrote unflatteringly of him here last March, Mr Clarke wrote a long, impassioned letter of rebuttal most fondly recalled for his denial of my mistaken claim that he attended a finishing school on the banks of Lake Geneva. "It is perhaps worth adding," he went on, "that my relationship with the Chancellor is extremely cordial."

A few months later, in the wake of the alleged failed coup, this cordiality extended to a series of unprecedentedly vicious attacks in which he variously described the Chancellor as "stupid", "deluded" and "a control freak". It is perhaps worth adding that the one politician he cited then as having the stature to succeed Tony Blair was a certain Alan Milburn.

"Politics is not a game," to return to Charlie's statement. "It is not a theatre in which certain individuals, certain policies go up and down on the merry-go-round of public opinion and media interest. Jade Goody is not the model for our political lives." Is she not? How odd, then, that on the day Messrs Clarke and Milburn held their press conference in Westminster, Ms Goody was holding one in Mumbai, whither she has flown in the hope of resurrecting her career with a trip she insists she is making (remind you of anyone?) for purely altruistic reasons.

Just as the Sunshine Boys were insisting that Gordon was overjoyed to receive their delegation earlier this week, Jade was telling her press gathering that Shilpa Shetty had invited her over for tea. "Shilpa is not interested in being used as a PR tool for Jade Goody," ran the subsequent denial from her spokesman. "It's obvious that Jade's here for the media mileage."

Change the names and that statement could have been issued verbatim by Gordon's press office, had he not too much sense to dignify the Milburn-Clarke charade with any response at all. By his enemies shall you know him ... and these enemies are such pygmies that he need do no more than stand still and silent to seem a more unstoppably colossal beast than ever before.

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