Greg Dyke gave an interesting speech to a meeting organised by CentreForum yesterday. I suspect a good number of those present had come because they thought he might be about to announce his candidacy for the London Mayoralty. But he didn’t say anything about that, and just stuck to the advertised title about how Britain’s democracy will fare under Prime Minister Brown.

A lot of what he said was not new. His theme was the public’s disengagement from the political process, and he was particularly critical of the unfairness of Britain’s electoral system, and how that contributed to the fact that so few people voted. He reminded us that 55% of those who voted at the last General Election voted against Labour, but they won with a clear majority anyway, and that taking into account the low turnout figure, in fact only 21% of voters actually voted for Labour.

But he clearly believed it passionately and it was interesting to hear him say how strongly he is committed to proportional representation.

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My first reaction to Brown’s plans announced today for constitutional reform, was to be pleasantly impressed. An end to some elements of the royal prerogative, such as institutionalising Commons votes before going to war, had seemed unavoidable for quite a while. But he went further than that, also ending the Prime Minister’s role in appointing Church of England bishops (you only need to say it to see how ridiculous it is in 2007), and opening up some key appointments to Parliamentary scrutiny. He has a long track record on some of this territory and I am prepared to accept that some of it is founded on genuine belief. And he even talked of ‘a Bill of Rights’ and a written constitution. There was nothing concrete on PR for the House of Commons, but some mood music suggesting it might possibly be on the cards.

But then I realised that we’d been here before. Have a look at this. In late 2003 - about half way through the last Parliament, as we are now in this - Blair suddenly announced that he was going to review the case for PR again. Many of us interpreted it as that Blair wasn’t really interested in doing it, but just wanted to put down a marker as an insurance policy in case he needed the Lib Dems after the next General Election. It was never heard of again, and since the result of the 2005 General Election was quite clear, it never needed to be resurrected.

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Our new Prime Minister started his premiership with the words “This will be a new government, with new priorities. This need for change cannot be met by the old politics…Let the work of change begin”

So which brand new figures, entirely untainted by any involved in Blair’s government of the last ten years, are tipped to take its leading roles?

Foreign Secretary - David Miliband

David Miliband spent the first four years of this Labour government as Head of Tony Blair’s Policy Unit in Number Ten. Since being elected to Parliament in 2001, he has held several ministerial jobs the previous Government, for the last two years in the Cabinet. He seems to be generally regarded as the leading figure favoured by Blair and the Blairites - so possibly not exactly the most definitive embodiment of a clean break from the Blair government.

Chancellor of the Exchequer - Alistair Darling

Alistair Darling was a member of Blair’s cabinet throughout his entire period as Prime Minister, from the day after polling day in 1997. He has held five cabinet posts in it, including at one point two at the same time. This is perhaps an example of where “change” means ministers changing back to a department they used to be part of (Darling spent the first year of Blair’s government as Chief Secretary to the Treasury).

Education Secretary - Ed Balls

Ed Balls was special adviser to Gordon Brown at the Treasury from 1997 to 1999, when he was appointed Chief Economic Advisor (a civil servant) at the Treasury. In 2005 he was elected to the House of Commons, and since last year has been Economic Secretary to the, er, Treasury. So if someone pointing out to Mr Balls another building in Whitehall than the Treasurys qualifies as “change” then I guess his appointment today fits the bill. Otherwise as changes go it’s not exactly revolutionary.

Health Secretary - Alan Johnson

Alan Johnson was a minister in Blair’s government only for nine of its ten years, since 1998 (he was only first elected to Parliament in 1997). By the standards of the other senior members of Brown’s first cabinet, this makes him virtually unassociated with Blair. It still does seem difficult however to make the argument that someone who until Blair went to the Palace was Secretary of State for a key spending and public services department, is a new figure in this “new Government”.

And of course the new guv’nor himself, as has been much pointed out (and by me here) is in fact more responsible for most of the things that he now says needs changing, than the new Steward and Bailiff of the three Hundreds of Chiltern.

UPDATE

Justice Secretary - Jack Straw

Difficult to keep up with the changing definitions - “change” now seems to mean the same ministers returning to substantially the same position as they held in the first period of Blair’s government.

I used to sit next to Quentin Davies at meetings of the European Movement’s Management Board, about ten years ago. He always seemed very courteous, and he was definitely a bona fide pro-European - but he is also very definitely a real Tory.

That makes him all the more valuable to Gordon Brown. Brown has been trying hard over recent months to close down the narrative which portrays Blair as the one who appealed to Middle England, and Gordon as the conscience of the Old Left within New Labour. Winning over a proper traditional old-style Tory, must surely be his ideal way to start his premiership (and clearly the timing of today’s announcement is not coincidental).

Davies will no doubt be a great start to Brown’s “Government of all the talents” - and I’ll be astonished if by the end of the week Davies is not a minister of some variety, or High Commissioner to Australia, or something.

His move is also of course yet another shove of the Cameron bandwagon off the rails. For his first year or a bit longer as Leader, it seemed that Cameron could do no wrong: all the momentum was with him. As I’ve noted before one reverse does not mean he’s lost the war, but the hole he’s finding himself in seems to be expanding.

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The important thing for the Lib Dems about the shenanigans of the last few days is that it has exposed that all Liberal Democrats take the same view of Gordon Brown’s offer of ministerial jobs: no thanks, Gordon.

What was perhaps an attempt to divide us has actually emphasised how united we are, and so strengthens us.

There seem to me to be two possible interpretations of the fact that Gordon Brown has been going around offering ministerial jobs to Liberal Democrats.

The first is that it is what it says it is, that Brown wanted to make a sincere attempt to extend his government beyond simply members of his own party, in the interests of the country and of his own progressive political perspective. It seems to me that this interpretation is at least a possibility. Brown is by background a highly tribal Labour politician - but he also has a track record of dramatic unexpected annnouncements - think independence for the Bank of England (ironically a Lib Dem policy!) - and it’s quite possible to see that he might want to start his premiership doing something to make his government really different and more than just the fag-end of Blairism. And he was not, if I remember my Ashdown Diaries right, one of the senior Labour cabinet figures in the 1997-8 phase who actively opposed Blair’s closer working Project.

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I have written my own personal view of the ten years of Blair’s government, here on Lib Dem Voice.

Today I watched Tony Blair deliver his resignation speech. He demits office as he took it up, certainly knowing how to pull the country’s heartstrings.

Electability is far from guaranteed for Labour, and a lot of their ability to win in the last ten years has come from Tone doing what he did today.

You could almost hear Labour party members around the country thinking that they won’t get that from Gordon Brown, and starting to wonder what they’ve done in being so keen to get rid of him”¦

I’m not involved in the Labour party and don’t have any special insight into it, but for a party which has perhaps the smoothest transition ever between leaders about to come off, it really does seem to be remarkably unsettled. Every day there seems to be rumours about how unhappy everyone is. And maybe it’s just because I’m an outsider, but the deputy leadership campaign going on, although proceeding quite happily as a contest in itself, seems to be taking place in remarkable isolation from the discussion about the future of the party. But maybe that’s just because I’m not privy to the Labour party debates on it - most of my contact is from a few Labour friends plugging their favoured candidate on Facebook, around Facebook, here, or elsewhere (for example here).

For what it’s worth I’ve long said that I think the Labour party, in everything except the short term, is jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire in going from Blair to Brown. Yes Blair certainly has his failings (don’t get me started on his so-called policy on Europe, for example), and obviously has Iraq hanging round his neck, but I think it will take the Labour party about ten seconds after he goes to start kicking themselves that they didn’t realise how good he was while they had him. It is very far from historically inevitable that Labour is credible and electable and acceptable to middle England - something a lot of post-1997 Labour people seem to have forgotten.

I can never see Brown being popular - he certainly doesn’t have the Richard & Judy charm of Blair - OK, it’s easy to deride Blair for that, but it was that more than anything else which convinced Britain that Labour was electable again. And by all accounts Brown’s style of management and working makes Blair’s look positively open and collegiate. I find it extremely difficult to see the public ever warming to him.

Brown is (quite rightly, from his point of view) very keen to show that his government is new and fresh and different from the Blair government of 1997-2007. He’s making a big fuss of his first 100 days and no doubt they will be full of whizzes and bangs. I imagine that if the public are polled, say, three months after he becomes PM then they will say lots of things have changed and he is doing a good job.

But the idea that it will be a different government is of course in reality nonsense. Policy on all the issues that Brown cares about over the last ten years has been dictated by Brown - in fact to a quite staggering degree, across every government department with the exception only really of defence and foreign affairs (and perhaps to some extent education). He might move from No 11 to No 10 but the person driving policy in all these areas will remain the same over the next few years as it has been over the last ten. And this will in the end be evident. My guess is that the same public, if asked after, say, a year of a Brown premiership if things are different to how they were under Blair, they will be clear that they aren’t. And that will of course be right.

Forget policy details, forget day-to-day rows over IT project overspends, forget even the state of the economy: the public have an innate sense that after a few years it’s time for a change and time to give the other lot a go. The only thing a government can vary about that is how long it takes them to reach that point. Brown knows that and that’s why he wants people to think his government is a new and different one - but I can’t see him succeeding.