Is Brown the New Blairck?

Did you see what I did there? I should be writing the headlines.

When Tony Blair became Prime Minister, he was surrounded by labour party members waving placards and pretending to be exuberant members of the public. It's a breath of fresh air to see Gordon Brown just give a speech, pose awkwardly on the doorstep of Number 10 with his wife, and then go inside.

Still, I have my reservations. To start with, the part of me that shrivelled up and died during the Blair years whispers to me in a hoarse voice, saying that Brown's brazen lack of care for image is in fact a calculated image in itself - the image of caring about substance more than presentation. And in any case, even if Brown does dismantle the Blair spin machine, it may only be a matter of time before David Cameron steps into Number 10 as an even more vacuous, even more right-wing 'Tory Blair'.

Even with positive changes on the horizon, such as the restoration of the right to protest outside parliament, it's tempting to fall into another trap. Why should we credit those we give power to for not abusing us? It should be the minimum we expect. It's bad enough that we can't seem to punish them when they do abuse us. Tony Blair's 'punishment' for supporting the deaths and torture of thousands of Arabs and Muslims (to say nothing of what he's done to the people who elected him), is to be made a peace envoy to the Middle East.

It's like sentencing an armed robber to become a bank manager.