The Labour party has ended up as the unloved child of the Blair–Brown divorce

Deep party feuds never really die: they just lie buried under the flimsy covering of the good times. For Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, such times have been brief indeed. My yoga teacher tells her wobbly pupils that the point of balance in a perfect headstand is the point just before we fall over. Mr Brown has discovered this goes for politics too.

Not least among his many horrors in a parliamentary session overwhelmed by a building society crisis, carelessly lost confidential files, inaccurate data on foreign workers and the funding scandal from hell, is the return of negative comparisons with his predecessor.

As soon as I heard people close to the PM saying at Labour conference, ‘Who really misses Blair now?’, I knew fate was being sorely tempted. Now the murmurs about ‘How Tony would have handled this’ buzz unfavourably around Mr Brown in his time of troubles. That is a golden glow too far.