The Blair-Brown divide may be narrow, and it's not just about the leadership

Both men remain broadly on the same, New Labour, side of the ideological divide in their party

Even as Charles Kennedy prepares to make his triumphant speech in Brighton today, the prospect of more carnivorous happenings in Bournemouth next week begins to exercise its irresistible pull. The gathering storm, if that's what it turns out to be at the Labour conference, can't fail to renew interest in the longest-running New Labour saga of all: the triangular relationship between party, Prime Minister and Chancellor Gordon Brown. This is not only because the latter is widely to assumed to be the likeliest successor to a leadership the former shows no sign of giving up. Rather, it's because it remains central, for good or ill, to the functioning of the Government, including - albeit in differing ways - on the domestic issues which currently preoccupy the party as much, if not even more than, Iraq.

That's not to underestimate the capacity of the conference to miss the point. The prospect of defeat for the leadership over foundation hospitals is as empty in reality as it is totemic. Formerly the subject of a fierce argument between Gordon Brown and Alan Milburn, it has now been resolved, largely in Mr Brown's favour, and in ways that make the policy a good deal less worrying than its critics allow.

Marshalling persuasive arguments, Mr Brown saw to it that the most far-reaching consequences of allowing autonomy to hospitals would be foreclosed. The problem of allowing unfettered borrowing powers to selected hospitals, as he pointed out, was what happened if they overreached themselves. No Labour government would allow a hospital to close down - so either the hospital would have to impose politically unacceptable charges or the taxpayer would have to bale it out.

Although the dispute was quite a conventional one, it was invested, especially by the proponents of maximising local autonomy, with great strategic significance: a fight between radicals and consolidators, with Mr Brown inevitably cast in the latter role. There are important strategic differences within government, which we'll come to in a moment. The question of whether the radical/consolidator model does justice to them is open to dispute - and strongly disputed in the Treasury.

In a perceptive essay in the new issue of Prospect, my colleague Steve Richards dares to strip away the personal soap opera from the Blair-Brown relationship and distill what separates the two men in terms of policy and ideology. This not because the personal rivalries don't matter. On the contrary, the chronic chilliness between the two men overlays much of the way the Government works.

No, it's worth doing because the impact on public policy of their relationship is palpable in a way the more glamorous but wholly speculative subject of the leadership succession still isn't. Richards' conclusion is broadly that while there are indeed differences of "tone, ideology and strategy", they are less dramatic than often depicted. He believes that when Mr Blair steps down, perhaps two years after the next election, and Mr Brown "almost certainly" succeeds him, there will be a "shift of emphasis but not a big change of direction".

This is a useful context in which to examine current areas of difference. Tuition fees form a much tougher issue than foundation hospitals, because their unpopularity in the Labour Party is matched by their potential unpopularity among voters, especially middle-class swing voters. But Mr Brown hasn't, as I understand it, disputed the inexorable logic of parents who can afford it making their contribution.

To simplify a complex subject, he has two strong reservations. The first is that in return for what he sees, with some reason, as an already generous funding settlement, the universities need to undergo some of the reforms - in internal governance and relations with business, for example, not to mention issues of access - which he believes many other institutions have to undergo. And the second concerns how the money will be paid back by markedly different income groups. Is it right, for example, that a badly needed graduate nurse or teacher should pay a much higher proportion of his or her income than - say - an accountant?

Whether these issues will be reopened in the current discussion of ways of making fees more palatable remains to be seen. But the point is not the detail but the Treasury's objection to being depicted as the enemy of reform. This is not just amour propre on the part of a Chancellor who feels that the independence of the Bank of England, sweeping tax and benefit changes, the Private Finance Initiative and a thought-out approach to NHS change makes this a spectacular piece of miscasting.

There is also something in the argument that the "change or die" message of self-styled radicals in government sometimes makes it sound as if reform were an end in itself rather than the means to a clearly identifiable set of goals - goals to which the Chancellor, with his mantra of "enterprise and fairness", would subscribe. And this is a difference of strategy rather than ideology.

This isn't meant to imply that there are no other differences between Tony Blair and his Chancellor. For example, Gordon Brown is said to be planning to revisit his first-term theme of "Britishness", challenging the notion that foreign policy can be defined merely as being a "bridge" between Europe and the US. Instead, he will argue that the country should have the confidence take a more active role in its relations with both continents. His attitudes to the European side of this equation are well known. He is convinced that that the British electorate won't accept full European integration until it sees the continent making some of the economic changes taken as read in the UK. He sees the British lead - of the kind it showed over the EU directive on the taxation of savings - as vital to persuading its EU competitors to look outwards to its global competition rather than inwards to internal harmonisation.

This approach could have implications for the transatlantic relationship. Mr Brown is in the comfortable position of being relatively uncontaminated by the war in Iraq while never having opposed it. Nor he is anything other than an ardent Atlanticist, who might well have acted exactly as Mr Blair did on Iraq. Yet the logic of a more proactive and confident approach to foreign policy may conceivably suggest some limits to the level of co-operation with a US administration when no clear British interest could be seen.

That is still open. But one conclusion that flows from all this is that the differences between the two men remain relatively narrow even where relatively deep. The fundamental ideological divide which the unions and some activists will seek to expose does not on the whole reflect the Brown-Blair relationship, both of whom remain broadly on the New Labour side of that divide. But stripped of the natural suspicion which characterises that relationship, there are some real questions to be answered here, as the Prime Minister might do well to acknowledge in his speech next Tuesday.

d.macintyre@independent.co.uk