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. Had dear Tony lived politically to see this scandal, there is no question what he would have had to do: namely resign. He could not have survived another dodgy funding saga, whatever the excuses.

Mr Brown knows this. That is why he calculated that his best chances of dealing with this latest and worst mess to land on the No. 10 doormat is to locate it way back (in government terms) in 2003 and have Jack Straw opine that it was ‘a matter of history’ that it started life in the nice and sleazy era of You Know Who.

Factually, Messrs Brown and Straw are right. Whether it was a clever or considered thing to say so, I doubt. The washing of hands has unleashed a behind-the-scenes bout of Blairite fury which is still capable of doing damage to Mr Brown. This row provides a connecter between the two regimes — and not as they would wish.