THERE WAS A TIME in the late 1970s when football fans would earnestly debate the identity of the next George Best. Kevin Keegan, England’s striker and twice European Footballer of the Year, was a candidate. Keegan, a fine player who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps since starting his career at Doncaster Rovers, had many admirers. The discussion finally reached the ears of Best. “Keegan,” he pronounced, “is not fit to lace my boots.”

John Roberts, a sports writer, went one further. “Lace Best’s boots?” he echoed. “He’s not fit to lace his drinks.”

And so it is with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The Chancellor genuinely believes that, were it not for a deal over dinner in Granita, he would now be midway through a third term as a much loved prime minister. The reality: he is not fit to lace Blair’s dodgy dossiers.

Whatever credence Brown gains as a chancellor, he surrenders as a vote-winner. He has always struggled to make a connection with the wider public and would therefore have been out of office years ago, just as he may never get to win an election as Labour leader. He would not have survived a catastrophe such as the Iraq war, for instance. The difference between Keegan and Best was the gulf that exists between hard graft and genius; the difference between Blair and Brown is that, politically, Blair is a natural, too. You don’t have to like his policies to understand that; you just have to watch him in action.

Any marketing man will tell you that Blair is new Labour. He is its unique selling point, the one Labour politician capable of casting a spell over middle-class, Middle England and making left-wing ideaspalatable. Even now, with Blair and Labour’s popularity at a low, those in the loop say that David Cameron’s Conservatives privately admit they would not fancy taking him on in an election. Everyone goes on about the Labour Party’s big bruisers, such as John Prescott and Charles Clarke, but without Blair you could have a reign of terror over that front bench with a balloon on a stick. There are people who cannot stand Blair, who feel he has made the biggest foreign policy blunder since Neville Chamberlain told the country how easy it would be to rub along with Adolf Hitler, yet still concede what a supreme presence he is in an emergency. His “I’ll get me coat” speech at the weekend was masterful, self-deprecating, human and, briefly, took the attention away from a government in turmoil. That is the supreme irony of Blair’s third term.

In a crisis there is nobody you would rather hear from, yet his policies are what have caused the crisis. The fallout from the war will continue long after his departure, yet from next year it will take place without his defiant reassurance that it will work out in the end. Blair is wrong, of course. The Iraq war was an entirely avoidable disaster and will remain so for ever: but you only have to look at the last election results to see the effect a few well- chosen words from the Prime Minister have on the easily charmed.

Brown? Having got his paw prints all over the clumsiest plot since Guy Fawkes pitched up outside Parliament with a box of Standard asking passers-by for a light, he then appeared on our television screens over Sunday breakfast, looking slightly less unsettling than Andrew Lloyd Webber in the early episodes of How Do You Solve a Problem like Maria?

The Phantom of the Opera music clearly doesn’t do Andrew any favours and there were surely strains of it in the distance as Brown got to work at the weekend convincing the public that he was not a mask-wearing, conniving predator, too. He did not succeed. The evidence against him is largely circumstantial but Brown has been left looking like the man that shot Bambi’s mum. Tom Watson’s clumsy house call; the photograph of Brown laughing; his ridiculous insistence that it is up to Blair to decide when he goes when, plainly, Gordon and his pals have been offering a great many helpful suggestions, mostly prefaced by a jabbed finger and the phrase: “Now look here, pal . . .” The BBC makeover department that has worked tirelessly on softening Lloyd Webber’s image would have been better tested by Brown. Yet, almost without trying, 24 hours earlier, Blair won the country over again. Calls to Labour Party HQ were running eight to two in Blair’s favour last week, and that was before the slick speech that underlined what a loss he will be to party politics.

Blair’s winning persona, we are told, is an act, but that is not entirely true. While he is a populist, he does genuinely seem to have right-wing ideas on certain issues, most particularly foreign policy. By contrast, when Brown does right-wing populism he comes across like the thinking man’s Alf Garnett, all World Cup Willie, Great Britain Day and National Service Lite (or the school cadets scheme as it is also known, a generous invitation to take a first step down the road to Helmand, where 33 British soldiers have now lost their lives in a situation as depressingly predictable as it is utterly futile). If Brown offered a genuine alternative — had he opposed the war, for instance — it would be different. As it is, he seconded Blair’s biggest mistake, so what is new? We’re getting rid of Ant, but keeping Dec.

Brown is always striving for the casual charm that Blair finds so easy, the way Keegan would have loved to be as naturally gifted as Best. Keegan became the nearest thing, though: the great player that is made, not born. Brown is Scottish and prefers rugby. Make of that what you will.