Steve Richards: Contrary to expectations, events are now moving very much Gordon Brown's way

Over the bank holiday I was out jogging with another political writer, both of us honing already athletic bodies and taking a break from the sweaty drama being played out in the Labour Party. What subject did we talk about as the sun shone and people lazed around nearby listening to iPods and reading books?

What do you think we talked about: films, theatre and the new Arctic Monkeys album? No, we discussed breathlessly the composition of Gordon Brown's first cabinet. I should add we were breathless largely because we were running up a hill. The excitement of the subject was only a secondary factor.

Related articles

• Brown plans to banish the legacy of Blair by engaging with Iran
• Levy to quit as Middle East envoy
• Search the news archive for more stories

There was agreement on that hill. Brown needed a fresh cabinet, stuffed full of bright new shining faces at every level. That was the easy bit. Much harder was agreeing on who he should sack. After all, he needed to keep most of the women. In addition, he could not remove too many of the Blairites. He would also want to retain those that had been close allies. By the time we had reached the top of the hill, most of the current cabinet was still in place.

Our exchange reminded me of a caller to a recent Five Live phone-in who declared angrily that he would get rid of the entire England football team and start again. When the host of the phone-in read out the names of the current team, the caller acknowledged he would select virtually all of them.

Then, within hours of our run, the Home Secretary, John Reid, announced that he was standing down. Suddenly Gordon Brown had some space at the top of the cabinet to make sweeping changes. There would be a new Home Secretary as well as a new Chancellor. As a bonus, there would be one less Scot. For whatever motives, perhaps self-interested or even malevolent, an unlikely figure had come to Brown's rescue.

How odd it all is. Brown is nowhere to be seen. Yet the days following last week's elections have been the best for him in a long time. Invisibility has its upsides. Three separate developments have played into his hands since he disappeared from public view.

The first is Reid's announcement. Some interpret the move as ominous for Brown, a rebuff from one of Tony Blair's more fanatical admirers. But voluntary resignations are nearly always more complicated than that. In recent months, Reid has been known to contemplate over a coffee, even in the hearing of disbelieving journalists, that he might pack it in when Blair goes.

Obviously, if there had been a clamour for him to be the next Prime Minister he would have put aside his desire to spend more time with his wife and Celtic football club. But I do not detect in his departure the first sign from the extreme Blairites of a determination to wreck Brown's government.

At this early stage, their intention at least is the opposite. The most ultra of the ultras, John Hutton, told me on GMTV at the weekend that he wanted to serve in the Brown cabinet, and expressed confidence that his political friends would unite around the new government in public and in private.

Hutton sang the praises of Brown at considerable length, an act almost more surprising than Reid's resignation. We shall find out whether the truce lasts more than a week or two, but for now, faction fighting is out of fashion in the Labour Party.

When I spoke to Hutton on Saturday, he knew that Reid would be appearing on another TV programme to make his statement on the Sunday. The ultra Blairites continue to talk to each other all the time, discussing their next moves. At the moment they plan to conspire constructively rather than destroy Labour in a way that the Conservative anti-Europeans wrecked their government in the 1990s. This is good news for Brown.

The urgent need for an outbreak of unity for Labour was confirmed by last week's local election results, which continue to be misread. They were far better for the Conservatives than most reports suggest. But the politics of Scotland, seemingly the more obvious disaster last Thursday, already looks much less threatening for Brown. Instead it is the SNP leader, Alex Salmond, who is in difficulty as he struggles to find coalition partners.

Strangely, the current mess in Scotland is a great advertisement for electoral reform. As a result of the voting system, the SNP will not get a majority in the Scottish parliament for a referendum on independence at any point in the next four years, rightly so as the majority of voters supported Parties that were against such a whopping big constitutional red herring.

Alex Salmond faces the prospect of governing precariously unable to implement his party's only distinctive idea. At the same time, Brown will not be dogged by endless destabilising speculation about a referendum on independence. Suddenly, one of the few certainties in politics is that there will not be one. This is also good news for Brown.

An election outside Britain was more obviously beneficial. The victory of Nicolas Sarkozy in France offers the scope for a modestly constructive relationship over Europe and other international matters. For this third positive development Brown owes much to Blair, a more assiduous pro-European Prime Minister than his reputation suggests.

Quick to pick out potential winners and alert to future diplomatic opportunities, Blair met Sarkozy six times in private over recent months. At one point, President Chirac pleaded with Blair to have no dealings with Sarkozy, Chirac's old enemy. Blair refused to comply, even meeting Sarkozy privately at a hotel to avoid the formalities of a Downing Street session. Blair is confident that Sarkozy wants to do a deal over the EU constitution that will not in any way revive the old document rejected by French voters. Sarkozy and Blair have discussed the issue many times, an example of partially selfless manoeuvring on Blair's part, as he knows he will not be around to benefit from the consequences of his cultivation. In his European partners, Brown is the lucky one.

Although Europe remains potentially explosive and the still wildly Eurosceptic Conservatives are ready to strike, Cameron faces a much tougher task portraying the likes of Sarkozy and Merkel as backward-looking figures that threaten Britain.

In the space of a few days, Reid takes a bow, Salmond is in trouble and France elects a relatively pragmatic European, the prelude to a new era in British politics. As I write, the BBC Parliament Channel is showing the entire coverage of election night in 1997, the opening of the era that is about to end. Every now and again, Labour's vaguely pragmatic anthem, "Things Can Only Get Better", can be heard in the background. At least the briefly invisible Brown has cause to conclude that, after the developments of recent days, things are not as bad as they could have been.

s.richards@independent.co.uk

More from Steve Richards