IT FELT spookily like a tipping point. If Gordon Brown does, after all, fail to succeed Tony Blair as Prime Minister, you wonder if historians will look back at the Chancellor’s awkward, oddly unpersuasive appearance on television yesterday as the moment when the leadership began drifting ineluctably out of his grasp.

Interviewed by Andrew Marr, Brown looked as uneasy, and as evasive, as a schoolboy summoned to see the headmaster about how Spraggins’s underwear came to find itself hoisted atop the school’s flagstaff, and just what part Master Brown might have played in this prank: to which Brown’s repeated response was permutations of, “wot, me Sir?”

A week after allegedly orchestrating — or, at any rate, doing little to quell — a clumsy coup against Blair’s failure to move out of No 10 by next Tuesday, Brown looked jolted, and wrong-footed, by the reaction to his apparent treachery; like the protagonist of a Shakespearean tragedy who is haunted by the prospect of being brought down by the very same cocktail of ambition, intelligence and resentment that has driven him to the brink of power.

So, has he been pressing Blair to vacate the leader’s seat, Marr wondered. Wot, me sir? “I’ve always said to Tony,” insisted Brown, “the decision is for him.”

Well, we all know that politicians don’t always give us a straight answer. But to anyone who has been paying attention to the news recently, this reply sounded about as straight as Liberace in a powdered periwig.

When quizzed about his reputation as a bully, and of being difficult to work with, Brown seemed torn between grinning generously, with its attendant risk of upsetting Charles Clarke by doing something “absolutely stupid”, and pleasing Clarke by looking stern, thereby panicking a waiting nation that, within a year, it would be being governed by a man with the demeanour of a funeral director. Brown mostly settled for a compromise option of half-grin/half-grimace; the expression of a guest at an ambassador’s party striving to suppress wind.

Even those who might imagine that there would be as much chance of Charles Clarke securing a seat in any future Brown administration as there is of Mel Gibson opening a felafel bar in Tel Aviv are foolishly misguided; because it turns out that Brown is not a man to hold grudges, and would consider all potential ministers on their merits.

Why Brown does not even seek a coronation. Indeed, he said, he “would welcome there being candidates for the election” for Labour leader, an invitation which bore the reluctant generosity of a child forced by his parents to inquire if anyone else wanted the last Malteaser before guzzling it himself.

Look, he has been very busy with the nation’s sums, certainly. But does that mean he is unsociable? Heck, no! He wants to assure us that “I am happy to talk about myself” — though sounding only slightly less convincing than Bill Clinton saying: “I’m happy to talk frankly about all the details of my intimacy with Monica Lewinsky.”

Having, just a week ago, looked like the impatient, but inevitable leader-in-waiting, Brown looked yesterday like a poker player who realised that he had overplayed his hand.

As Brown painted a damage-limitation portrait of an easy-going family man in no rush to become Prime Minister, Marr made one last stab at goading the Chancellor into acknowledging that he was maybe not quite so innocent a bystander in the events of the past week as he was seeking to make out. Where, Marr inquired of Brown’s once friendly relationship with Tony Blair, did it all go wrong?

“I don’t think it has gone wrong,” Brown snapped back. “And I think Tony himself would say that.”

Which left us all with one question: has Gordon Brown been smoking something?

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