Alan Watkins: Prime ministers are prey to delusion. I am filled with apprehension for Mr Brown

What is dangerous is the notion that we can save mankind

One of my colleagues has written that Mr Gordon Brown and his visit to India were driven off the front pages by the row about Big Brother. This seems to me the direct opposite of what occurred. Indeed, is still going on. So far from being upstaged by Ms Jade Goody and her playground pals, the Chancellor has become part of the act.

Mr Brown has won admiring opinions for a couple of sentences of conventional political piety. He has proved himself even more adept with the quick all-purpose quote than Mr Tony Blair. I sometimes think we Welsh are the only surviving unprotected species in western Europe, not to mention the United States, and long may that state of outlawry continue.

Whatever the merits of the business may be, it was Ms Goody who put Mr Brown at the top of the news bulletins, not the expansion of higher education in the Indian sub-continent or the increase of the gross domestic product.

Mr Nick Robinson, the BBC's political editor, always reminds me of a sharp radio comedian from a bygone, more purely verbal, era, an impression which is wholly in his favour. But even he, who is not devoid of a sense of humour - quite the reverse, I should have thought - seemed to think it bizarre to find himself broadcasting from India about a debased television programme from London.

Quite who is to accompany a senior politician on one of his (or her) frequent trips abroad is among the byways of modern journalism. The Prime Minister has for some years now (at least since the days of Harold Macmillan, I estimate) taken the lobby correspondents with him, the "political editors" as they are now called.

Political editors, who rarely edited anything, were transformed from the more accurately named political correspondents in order to escape one of Edward Heath's pay policies and accordingly to be paid slightly more money. Other specialist correspondents were given similar dignity, from the same financial motive. But this is by the way.

As I say, political editors have a monopoly of the Prime Minister, just as the Prime Minister has a monopoly of them. Seats are - or, at all events, used to be - offered at cut-price rates on the Downing Street aeroplane, so saving the newspapers money, though not very much of it.

Chancellors of the Exchequer customarily have been less adventurous in their travelling plans. After all, the more glamorous functions of the Foreign Secretary have steadily been eliminated in favour of the primacy of the first Lord of the Treasury. The Chancellor has to stay at home. Indeed, he ought to stay at home.

In Henry James's short story "The Lesson of the Master" an established author is giving some advice to his younger disciple: "That takes off a little of my esteem for this thing of yours - that it goes on abroad. Hang 'abroad'! Stay at home and do things here - do subjects we can measure."

For some months now, Mr Brown has shown signs of wanting to visit faraway places with strange-sounding names. As a virtual certainty to go on to No 10, he is now accompanied by the BBC's political editor. True, The Guardian's man on the spot is that paper's economics editor, Mr Larry Elliott. So the entourage is divided between political editors, as they are now called, and other editors, all of whose qualifications for editing are by no means self-evident, to say the least.

This is a step up for Mr Brown. There can be no doubt about that. But I am filled with apprehension. Mr Brown may be going through the motions, pretending an interest he does not feel or a knowledge he does not possess, to create a favourable impression on both counts. If that is so, there is no great harm done. What is dangerous is the notion that we - or the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom - can save mankind.

With Mr Blair, what started off as being dangerous has become disastrous. As we know, several post-war prime ministers, probably a majority of them, possessed a conviction that they could change the world; or, if they did not start off with this view, they came to acquire it during their period of office. Almost all prime ministerial memoirs give more space than one would expect to matters of foreign policy.

Whether this was because the Prime Minister of the day really did devote more hours to this activity than most of us thought at the time is questionable. Equally, it may be that, writing in his study - or, more likely, supervising a team of research assistants, or hitting the keyboard like anything - the retired Prime Minister is more likely to exaggerate his or her achievements.

But Mr Blair has no such need. He is our most bellicose Prime Minister since Lord Palmerston or, before him, Lord Chatham. In a recent contribution to the New Statesman, however, Mr Peter Hain sought to detach himself and the whole of the Labour Party from what he chose to call United States neo-conservatism. In reality he was not merely trying to denounce a minority cult of New York intellectuals. He wanted to renounce Mr Blair and most of his works.

Good for Mr Hain and all who sail in him! But it is a little late in the day for a show of repentance, all the same. Not only did Mr Hain, with others, take us into the Iraq war. So also did a clear majority of the parliamentary Labour Party. And this includes Mr Brown. Once the Chancellor returns to these shores, a good deal of contrition remains to be called for on his part.

Since David Lloyd George, numerous prime ministers have not been elected nationally first. They have arrived mid-term, whether as a result of political skulduggery or internal party election: Stanley Baldwin, Winston Churchill, Macmillan, Alec Home, James Callaghan and John Major. Only two successions were uncontested, those of Neville Chamberlain and Anthony Eden.

The Callaghan succession of 1976 plays tricks with the memory of others. For some reason, people seem to think that Jim was the agreed choice. After three ballots, in fact, Callaghan came top, defeating Michael Foot by 176 votes to 137 so Mr Foot could easily have become Prime Minister. Who knows? He might have made quite a good job of it. At least he would not have allowed himself to be impaled on the government's five per cent pay norm. Instead we shall all be endlessly speculating about Mr Brown. This is the stagnant swamp into which Mr Blair has now led us.