At the conclusion of last week's column I posed the question whether voters at the forthcoming election could engineer a result which delivers the premiership not to Tony Blair, but to Gordon Brown. As promised, I shall attempt to deal with the question this week - but let me make clear at the outset that there is no easy answer. Mr Brown is not a candidate for Prime Minister in this election, and if Mr Blair wins big in May, he could very easily find himself on the backbenches within 24 hours of polling day. Indeed, if reports last weekend are to be believed, the Chancellor's job has already been as good as offered to Darlington MP Alan Milburn - though frankly, I'm not sure if I do believe them. But there is, nevertheless, a more-than-plausible sequence of events that could put Mr Brown in 10 Downing Street, if not by May 6, then at the very least, by the end of next year. It involves Labour's majority either being wiped out altogether, or reduced to such a level that it represented merely a pyrrhic victory for Mr Blair. The Prime Minister would be forced to forget about his grandiose plans to serve a "full third term," and would probably only be permitted a short lap of honour before handing over to his old rival. The question, then, is whether the voters can actively bring about such a scenario - or whether it is something that, if it happens at all, will have to happen purely by accident. Regular readers of this column will probably not need reminding why it is that I think Mr Brown would make a better Prime Minister than Mr Blair. Suffice to say that I believe he alone has the political courage and ideological commitment to build the progressive consensus that Mr Blair has failed to deliver, despite eight years and two huge landslides. But never mind what I think - an ICM poll this week suggested a large proportion of the public agree, with a net 45pc of voters seeing him as an asset compared to just 2pc for Mr Blair. The fact that the Tories were forced to drop their "Vote Blair, Get Brown" campaign when they realised it was helping Labour only serves to underline the Chancellor's standing. Labour's own campaign strategy rests crucially on depicting Michael Howard as the only viable alternative to Mr Blair - but this is, at best, highly misleading and at worst, deliberately disingenuous. Because Conservative support is more spread across the country while Labour's is more concentrated, the Tories will have to win many more votes to translate them into a Commons majority. So even if Labour and Tories tied on 35pc of the vote - not impossible in view of Tuesday's poll showing them three points apart - it would still deliver a 42-seat majority for Mr Blair. Mr Howard can only secure an outright majority if the Tory vote goes up to around 40pc while Labour's slumps to around 30pc, which at present is a much less plausible scenario. It follows, then, that Mr Howard's chances of becoming Prime Minister in May are in fact somewhat lesser than Mr Brown's. The forthcoming election is not primarily a battle between Labour and the Tories, it is a contest between Blair and Brown, with the size of Labour's majority determining the winner. If Mr Blair can secure another big win - probably by around 80 seats or more - he will be free to shift Mr Brown out of his Treasury power base and bring in much more thoroughgoing New Labour reforms. But if Labour gets back in with a majority of around 50 or less, Mr Brown's position will be secure and ultimately it will be Mr Blair who is doing the shifting. So to return to my original question - can that growing band of voters who would prefer Mr Brown to Mr Blair do anything to bring about that outcome? Well, yes. And the key to unlocking this political conundrum is an intriguing phenomenon known to those who study voting trends as "tactical unwind." At the last two elections, Labour won around 40 additional seats thanks to Lib Dem supporters concluding their own party's cause was hopeless and voting tactically against the Tories. If those voters were now simply to support their own party, it would bring Labour's Commons majority down from 161 to around 80. But what would happen if the trend of tactical anti-Tory voting that has marked the last two elections were not merely to unwind, but go into reverse - and become tactical anti-Blair voting? What, for instance, would happen if Tories and disillusioned Labour supporters were to vote tactically for the Liberal Democrats in the 51 seats where they are in second place to Labour? The answer is that if Charles Kennedy's party could win just half of those seats, that, together the impact of tactical unwind would bring Labour's overall Commons majority down to around 30. And a result like that would - after a decent interval to allow Mr Blair to undertake a farewell tour - be enough to see Mr Brown ultimately installed in 10 Downing Street. There is no doubt that such a strategy would have some unfortunate victims - for instance the estimable Labour MP for Newcastle Central, Jim Cousins, whose seat is vulnerable to a Lib Dem surge. But in what has become an increasingly presidential system, it is asking too much of the public to differentiate between New Labour and True Labour MPs. There are increasing signs that traditional Labour supporters and floating voters alike now see the Chancellor as the best Prime Minister available - but voting Blair won't in fact give us Brown. Rather, the watchword at the next election should be: To Get Brown, Vote Kennedy. | 
