And the winner is ... Gordon Brown
By CNN's European Political Editor Robin Oakley
 |  Brown (left): No longer surly and resentful? |
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| ROBIN OAKLEY'S ELECTION BLOG | |
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LONDON, England (CNN) -- Three days to go and already this election campaign has thrown up one sure-fire winner.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown has been a dominating influence on the campaign. He has in the process ensured that, given the Labour victory the polls are indicating, he can keep his present job as long as he wants it and he has assured his position as the heir apparent to Tony Blair.
For three years Blair and Brown have been snapping at each other behind the scenes -- the chancellor surly and resentful that Blair had not stepped down in his favor during the last Parliament, as he believed he had promised to do; the prime minister increasingly resentful of Brownite hobbles on his plans to extend more choice and private provision into public services.
Increasingly Brown appeared to be the voice of Old Labour, a reassurance to those who felt that Tony Blair had hijacked their party.
In his party conference speech in 2002, Blair set out a vision of an ever more free market future.
"At our best when we are boldest," he cried.
In his party conference speech of 2003, Brown went as close as he dared to a public challenge by declaring: "You don't defeat the Tories by invitation or by better presentation, but by Labour policies and Labour reforms grounded in our Labour values."
Labour, he argued, needed not just a program but a soul. And he added with a conscious back-reference reprimand: "This Labour Party. Best when we're boldest. Best when we are united. Best when we are Labour."
When last autumn Tony Blair brought back the Blairite Alan Milburn into the Cabinet and gave him charge of Labour's election campaign, playing the role largely occupied by Brown in the last two elections, it looked as though relations between Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street had reached final breaking point.
Blair-favoring media outlets carried stories suggesting that after an election Brown would be moved from the Treasury to the Foreign Office, if not dropped from government altogether.
Yet early in this election, Labour launched a soft-focus buddy movie directed by Oscar-winning Anthony Minghella showing Brown and Blair at work, rest and play in total unison, reading each other's thoughts and echoing each other's lines. Elegant fiction, we scoffed. But remarkably the real thing has proved even cozier.
Brown and Blair went together to visit the Rover factory workers who lost their jobs when the firm collapsed. They have toured the marginal seats in unison, sat together at press conference after press conference. Brown has hailed Blair as the most successful leader in Labour's history. Blair has called Brown the most successful Chancellor in a hundred years and publicly guaranteed him the job after the election, provided Labour wins.
Having announced that this is the last election he will fight, Blair has effectively anointed Brown as his successor and at the same time declared his belief that his own legacy will be assured, that New Labour will continue to be New Labour under his successor.
For both men, and for the Labour Party, the re-forged alliance has been crucial.
With up to two-thirds of the British electorate convinced that the prime minister has been at least "economical with the truth" over Iraq, Brown has provided moral cover, taking it to the ultimate when he did not hesitate in the face of a question on whether he would have taken Britain to war in Iraq but simply replied "Yes," with Blair beside him almost gulping in gratitude.
Blair has needed the chancellor beside him to trumpet Labour's achievements on the economy, the achievements that have made it so hard for the Tories to attack them full frontally.
But Brown has recognized that even now the prime minister reaches parts of the electorate other Labour leaders are unlikely to reach and that he can benefit from a bit of Blair branding too. Labour's manifesto was a surprisingly comfortable compromise between their two viewpoints.
Despite talk six months ago that Gordon Brown would be relegated to the backrooms, Labour has operated through the election virtually as a dual leadership, with Brown steadying the ship and sometimes looking the senior partner.
Opinion polls have indicated that if Brown had been Labour's leader already they would be even further ahead in the polls. Certainly if Labour has been in danger, and we may never know, then Brown is the man who has diverted or diluted that danger.
With the other parties insisting it is an election about trust, the electors have indicated that they do trust Brown, whatever their reservations about Blair.
What none of us knows at this stage, of course, is whether the renewed Blair-Brown combo is simply a remarriage of convenience.
As Groucho Marx said, sincerity is the greatest of all attributes, and if you can fake that you've got it made.
But if it were all a fake-tan relationship the cracks would surely be starting to show by now and they are not.
It could just be that the two men have rediscovered something of the chemistry which bound them together in the days before the sadly premature death of John Smith, Labour's last leader, forced their party to make a choice between the two young joint-architects of the New Labour project and the green-eyed monster began to color their relationship.
Gordon Brown's heavyweight presence has done more than anything to reassure potential Labour peel-offs to the Liberal Democrats that they can stay with a party led by the man who took the country to war in Iraq and still respect themselves in the morning.
He has helped Labour to keep at least some of the focus on the economy and public services. A campaign led solely, presidentially by Tony Blair in the way that Michael Howard has led the Tories would never have achieved that.
If, as the polls indicate, the two are soon to be back at Number 10 and Number 11 Downing Street, the strains may begin to show again, particularly if Blair starts showing signs of wanting to continue in office to the bitter end of the next Parliament and Brown once again becomes impatient with waiting.
Much will depend on the size of any Labour majority.
But it has been an effective alliance and a demonstration of the value of unity, or at least apparent unity, in politics.
