Can no one see the danger of Brown?

Brown's favourable reputation as Chancellor is based on two things: maintaining economic stability, which was of course his inheritance from the Tories, and a brave decision taken early on to grant independence to the Bank of England. But beyond that, his warm embrace of all manner of regulation, which has so eroded our competitive edge with the European Union, speaks of a very different sort of Chancellor.

A traditional, very Scottish, Labour figure entirely content with the dominance of the State in all aspects of national life so familiar north of the border. And how foolish to expect it to be otherwise for a man who has not spent a millisecond of his life in the private sector.

Backward looking philosophy

Brown's attitude to public expenditure lays bare the man's backward looking philosophy. Behind an intellectually spurious distinction between current expenditure (bad) and capital expenditure (good), Brown has embarked on a reckless expansion of public spending, while letting borrowing take the strain of paying for it. Plus ca change. This is the world Denis Healey inhabited 30 years ago!

Had he been a true moderniser, Brown would have insisted on rigorously measuring outputs - the benefits bought by all that new money. But as the NHS readily proves, he's an inputs man, forever boasting how expenditure on health has increased, while working to shore up the Stalinist bureaucracy at the heart of the service.

Last year NHS expenditure increased by 12%, but front-line patient services by only 2.4%. The rest was sucked into pay, pen pushers, and the technology required by the centralised Eastern European management model Brown favours. The NHS's new IT system, for instance, has already cost more than £20bn.

I asked a veteran old Labour Parliamentarian yesterday how certain it is that Brown will succeed Blair. One hundred per cent he smugly replied. So what manner of Prime Minister would Brown be? Not just a big State man Attlee and Wilson could embrace as a brother, but an egocentric control freak, uncomfortable in the limelight, but determined to hog it.

On-going vendetta

How else can one explain the extraordinary self-indulgence of Brown's on-going vendetta with Blair. Why do we know all about that meal at the Granita Restaurant in Islington, when Blair and Brown carved up the leadership of the Labour Party between them, except that Brown's acolytes keep reminding us of it? Why do we know of an extraordinary remark Brown is supposed to have made to Blair and refuses to deny - 'There is nothing you could tell me I could any longer believe' - except it's the gospel Brown's disciples keep on preaching?

Sour relations between a Prime Minister and his Chancellor are nothing new. But never before have they been based on the vaulting ambition of a Chancellor to oust his boss, regardless of the damage such tensions do to the Government's reputation.

Brown's relentless focus on the succession is all of apiece with Brown the man - a driven workaholic whose new family has not rid him of a disquietingly single-minded obsession with politics.

When I was a minister and doing early morning radio, I would regularly repair to a Westminster greasy spoon for a fry-up, and could be certain of one companion, Gordon Brown, enjoying, of course, a solitary repast before embarking on yet another day of remorseless toil.

Tortured persona

A virtue you might think, except that level of monastic obsessiveness never is. And Brown's bitten-down fingernails, and tortured persona, tell of a man uncomfortable in his own skin. A man whose desperate desire to be Prime Minister does not embrace a fresh vision of how to use all that power once he has it, except perhaps to take us back to an old Labour future where Brown himself is so deeply rooted.

Award-winning columnist Matthew Parris, a shrewd observer of politics, said last week at a Brighton conference under my chairmanship, that Brown could be selected as PM, but never elected by the voters. For Parris as for me, Brown's personality, once under the relentless microscope of the premiership, can only emerge as unappealing.

It is a tragedy for the Tories that what seemed like a clever slogan 'Vote Blair. Get Brown' has, like Frankenstein's monster, returned to terrorise its creators. Because Brown's perceived success in bribing people with their own money makes him for many voters turned off by Blair a reassuring choice, when the reality is so very different.

Ten days out the key question is - are the Tories too weak and the public too blind to avert a mistake of historic proportions?

David Mellor is a former Conservative Cabinet Minister