Not Made in Our Image and Likeness

Encompassing all political activity within New Labour was one of the most pernicious of the Project's policies. Containing policy analysis and choice within the Party and, worse, very narrowly within the Party elite, defining all other opposition as outside normal or even legal activity undermined a characteristic of the post War political settlement that led to undermining democracy itself.

Holding power never meant holding power to the exclusion of everyone else. There is a great body of agreement on what is reasonable and expected in our politics and society and a strong sense of a political pendulum moving across sets of emphases as times and external imperatives and gains in one social group or another generate new circumstances. Parties themselves react with growth and change but move within political parameters that we have called Labour and Conservative. It is an understanding that fits very well with the autopoiesis of our Constitution.

The Brown regime holds no such conception of co-operation, change, self reform. Opposition is not just mistaken or wrong, it is bad, immoral, unacceptable of its very oppositionyness.

It is no accident that we have all identified Mr Brown's personality and noted that the traits he displays so markedly are present also in those he regards as his circle. The clutching of power to self, the secretiveness, the sense that only he can 'make that happen', the surprise that disagreement is regarded as noteworthy and should be acceded to when another view is preferred by the majority. As a person Mr Brown simply does not fit onto our democratic and political system. And now it is extruding him from itself with the strength that he had thought of as weakness - its infinite, informal, innate adaptability to the nature of our social and political order.

Charles Clarke, a Kingsman, called Brown 'uncollegiate'. Precisely.