I want it all back. Every minute of it. The hours, the days, the weeks I’ve spent listening to people going on about the Blair-Brown relationship. Give it me back, God (or Richard Dawkins, whichever of you is up there), and I promise I’ll use the time better this go around.

Granita; new Labour versus old Labour; Gordon’s holding out over the single currency; sources say he’s furious; they’re furious; this month nobody is furious; now they are furious again; will he or won’t he; the question is when; he doesn’t want to say; apparently he threw a wobbly; that’s not what I’m hearing; Alan Johnson; maybe not Alan Johnson. Aaaaaaaaaagh. Shut up, shut up, shut up.

They’re on about it again as you read this. The Queen is getting togged up to go to Parliament and read her speech and the airwaves are dominated by Blair-Brown blah. Is the new legislative agenda agreed with the Chancellor? Does it trap him? Yes. No. Who cares?

Look, it is not that this is all unimportant. It’s the relationship between the Chancellor and the Prime Minister, for heaven’s sake. It’s the future of the Government. Of course it’s important. It’s just that I think we’ve spent much of the past decade getting it wrong.

The debate about Blair and Brown has centred on this idea: Mr Blair is new Labour while Mr Brown, if not exactly old Labour, has old Labour tendencies. Those who find this formulation too crude describe Mr Brown as being more of a traditionalist or as being more concerned with the party, but these are different words to make basically the same point.

Occasionally someone sticks up for the Chancellor and says that he is new Labour to his fingertips. But then they find it hard to answer the follow-up question — why does he differ from Mr Blair and why doesn’t the Prime Minister entirely trust him to keep the party on the right track?

The answer came to me while I was watching Mr Blair make his final party conference speech. (I wasn’t as impressed by it as everyone else, by the way, because after saying a lot of things that I agreed with entirely he concluded: “You take my advice. You don’t take it. Your choice. Whatever you do, I’m always with you. Head and heart.” Whatever you do, I am with you? What’s that about?)

Just after he’d defended his Iraq policy and just before he lambasted David Cameron, the Prime Minister said this: “A governing party has confidence, self-belief. It sees the tough decision and thinks it should be taking it. Reaches for responsibility first. Serves by leading . . . The British people will, sometimes, forgive a wrong decision. They won’t forgive not deciding.”

And then I realised. The person who is no longer new Labour is Mr Blair. The division between the Prime Minister and his Chancellor is not that Mr Brown is in any way old Labour. It is that Mr Brown is new Labour to his fingertips, dogmatically new Labour, the architect of the whole building and still tied to his blueprint. The Prime Minister, meanwhile, has moved on.

The campaign run by the Labour Party between 1994 and 1997 was one of the most innovative and effective in British political history. You establish trust on key Tory issues such as the economy so that you can draw dividing lines with them in the best places; you avoid creating unpopular policies and change the subject on difficult issues; you characterise hard choices as false choices and develop a third way, an unexpected way, of dealing with them (for example, don’t raise income tax, don’t cut spending, impose a windfall tax); you are not above using what the unkind might call a gimmick as a way of showing you care about an issue. That’s the substance.

And the style? You campaign continuously, fight the war round the clock, seeing everything as political, keeping focus, letting nothing go; you agressively combat every small slight made by every two-bit journalist but schmooze their proprietors and editors like crazy; you never answer a question you don’t want to answer and relentlessly repeat your soundbites; you expect loyalty and discipline from every party member with you in total control, at the head of a small group at the top.

Is there one part of this that the Chancellor has departed from since 1994? I can’t think of one. The world has changed a great deal in the past ten years, but not the Chancellor. He is still plugging away.

His idea of an independent board for the NHS was classic new Labour (not for all that choice stuff, not against all reform, a third way). So was his Veterans Day (we can be trusted on Tory cultural issues). His relations with the press follow the new Labour rulebook exactly.

Now think about the Brown-Blair divide over tuition fees. It was characterised as an old Labour versus new Labour fight. Wrong. The Chancellor was taking the classic new Labour view. He felt that there was no point putting forward an unpopular policy when it wasn’t strictly necessary. He turned up to the Cabinet committee meeting where they were dotting the “i”s and crossing the “t”s on the policy paper and provoked a stand-up row with Charles Clarke by proposing that they not have a policy at all.

But for Mr Blair this classic new Labour position is no longer enough. The British people “won’t forgive not deciding”, remember? He is fed up with the caution of the classic approach and wants to go farther, faster towards free markets, globalisation and liberal interventionist wars, if only he could get it through the party. He doesn’t mind so much being unpopular, it’s too late for all that. He can’t be bothered chasing down every small negative article and has replaced his aggressive war room with an exasperated shrug. He thinks people are tired of repeating soundbites; he now prefers lengthy exhausting explanations.

We’re about to hear the last Blairite Queen’s Speech. Then prepare for the return of new Labour.

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