No doubt orchestrated from Downing Street (Nos 10 & 11), Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have apparently got the Succession Question sorted to their satisfaction. They are now running a dual premiership until Brown takes over.

It doesn't say much for New Labour that, in the nine years it has been in power, with a record number of MPs, no new figure has emerged to challenge the Blair-Brown axis.

MPs of the true Left have been marginalised. And the rest, career politicians all, have been cravenly ready to back policies against much of what they supposedly stand for.

But my money is still on an outsider coming up on the rails in the Premiership Stakes. Almost regardless of whoever he/she proves to be, I'll be urging on the unfancied contender.

Politicians who take too much for granted deserve to have their noses not merely put out but well and truly bloodied.

Meanwhile, New Labour's drubbing in the Dunfermline and West Fife byelection appears to have made little difference. Tony Blair said: "This is the moment to stand firm, to have faith that the changes we are making will, in time, work to our country's advantage and therefore to us."

His 'we' is really 'I', for, to many in his audience at Labour's spring conference, his policies are anathema. This mirrors the virtual dictatorship under which we now live, since Tony Blair is having to fight tooth and nail to get his reforms past his own party. It is a grotesque situation worthy of Alice in Wonderland.

Nevertheless party lieutenants - Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell is one - insist the party will listen to the people. Do the people want Trust schools? Probably not, since few understand why schools funded by a car dealer should, almost ipso facto, be better than those run through local authorities, who have 150 years experience behind them.

Do the people want regional government? Though the resounding No delivered in the North-East is taken to signal feelings nationwide, the Government is pressing on with this project by stealth - a double contempt for the electorate.

What might the people want, with just cause? The state pension relinked to earnings. Dentistry brought fully within the NHS, instead of being further privatised. Tougher sentences for violence and serious driving or repeat offences. More police on the street, which could be funded by the probable cost of the nationwide boundary rejig now in the offing - part of the unacknowledged regionalisation mentioned above.

A small clutch of ideas there that might save Labour at the next by-election and indeed the general election.

But, of course, we were talking fantasy. Yet there are matters on which New Labour kowtows meekly to popular opinion. Cheap air travel is accepted despite its heavy contribution to pollution. Tony Blair says it would require a fairly hefty whack to reduce the flights, and this would be hard to sell.The answer is that fuel tax should be raised in stages, over perhaps as long as 20 years. If, at the end of that time, new technology hasn't solved the pollution problem then, yes, we will have to fly less.

Did Tony Blair say something about making change is hard, managing it is difficult? Yes he did. But Bold Blair has chickened out of this one.