The firefighters face a menacing and implacable enemy. Gordon Brown made it clear in an interview with The Times yesterday that there will be no more money for them. Or, to put it more Brownly, “We are on a long-term course. It is a resolute long-term approach from which we are not going to be deflected by short-term quick fixes. We have a fiscal and monetary discipline that allows us to plan for the long term.”

Firefighters’ pay is not really the Chancellor’s territory. Nor, as you may have noticed, is English. He is obsessed with perhaps two things: the economy and fighting poverty. He has basically been repeating the sentence above, or variants of it, for five years. He never says anything different. Here he is, elsewhere in the interview, on the economic downturn: “The important thing to recognise is that this is not the time for short-termism. This is not the time to attempt quick fixes. This is the time for staying our course and saying that the tough disciplines that we put in place are the disciplines that are right for the British economy so that we can meet our fiscal rules. . .”

Or on whether his growth forecasts will be downgraded: “I believe it is precisely because we took the tough and difficult decisions . . . we are better placed to meet the fiscal rules and realise our spending plans. It is a resolute long-term approach from which we are not going to be deflected by short-term quick fixes or lurching this way or that.”

While the country applauds his brilliance, Mr Brown sits in his Treasury, saying nothing, meaning everything. Here he is, for instance, on tax increases: “You would never get any Chancellor sitting in front of you to predict his Budget or to announce it in advance. It is the answer I have given every year from 1997 onwards.” Which our political editor has to translate for him as: borrowing will be allowed to rise before direct taxes.

Here is a measure of his power: he cannot be bothered to speak the same language as the rest of us, but instead we chase after and decode his semi-colons as if he was some kind of male Sibyl.

The Prime Minister, on the other hand, speaks with exhausting fluency and has never needed decoding in his life. He talks, and talks. It is like a marriage where one partner is flinty and silent and the other has collapsed into verbal diarrhoea in reaction. Even now, after five years’ close work together, the two men retain utterly distinct styles and completely different, though not usually mutually exclusive, interests.

Mr Blair’s agenda is public service reform, Northern Ireland, Iraq, world poverty. It used also to include the euro, but the prospect of a referendum is effectively dead for the next couple of years at least. Note Mr Brown’s dismissive comment in yesterday’s interview, that “the statements made by Tony Blair are exactly in line with Government policy”. This is the Chancellor’s policy now, and those five tests are being comprehensively failed even as you read this. Not even the Prime Minister refers to a euro referendum as a priority anymore.

Both men’s interests unite, however, in their determination to see off the firefighters’ demands for a 40 per cent pay increase, Mr Brown because of all that fiscal rectitude at stake, and Mr Blair because of the threat to his reform agenda by public sector workers striking over unreasonable pay demands.

The “last spasm” of the hard Left, the Prime Minister calls the poses struck by the likes of Andy Gilchrist, of the Fire Brigades Union, and Bob Crow, of the RMT. Mr Blair appears completely unmoved by their threats. He is extraordinarily confident at the moment, and not in a mood for compromising with people he believes are simply wrong, as shown by his unambiguous challenge to the IRA in Northern Ireland last week. He is not afraid of the FBU. He did not seek a confrontation; he offered them an independent pay review chaired by Sir George Bain, and they have not even waited for it to report. If they will not even co-operate with the Bain inquiry, what can he do? A Prime Ministerial shrug.

I get the impression that No 10 is going to keep Mr Blair out of the front line on this one for as long as it possibly can. He will not be chairing the emergency Cobra meetings.We are unlikely to see the Prime Minister coming in to “take control”, as he did during the fuel protests. No 10 believes that public sympathy for the firefighters is skin-deep and will quickly wane if lives are lost and property is unnecessarily damaged. It thinks, or hopes, that not all the FBU is prepared for this fight.

The Government has bought off protesters before, but not union protesters. Where it has given financial concessions — to the fuel protesters and pensioners, for instance — it has been only to the sort of middle-class voters whose anger terrifies new Labour. And where it is weak, it is weak because its big beasts are scrapping; witness the mess over foundation hospitals, and mixed messages about the NHS generally. This time, for once, they are all in a row.

At the front, jowls shaking, the old union mucker John Prescott. Behind him, guarding his reform strategy, the Prime Minister. But behind Tony Blair, this time at least, the brooding menace of Gordon Brown. This is not his dispute. He will not take the flak if things go bad, or chair emergency committees. But he is the power. It is his numbers and his grand plan, that are skewering the firefighters. They will be skewered by him, and they will not be the first.

All Mr Gilchrist has is a tactic; he has not worked out a strategy. If I were him, I would begin working on an exit strategy.

Contribute to Debate via comment@thetimes.co.uk

Times Recommends

• We must lead the world to stability
• The recession's a blessing in disguise
• The guilty men who sent mum to Iceland