Brown is falling out with Blair (again). History shows how dangerous that is

The open conflict between the two is certainly dangerous. Whether it is also truly ideological is much less certain

One of the more startling revelations in Giles Radice's wonderfully illuminating book Friends and Rivals is that Tony Blair asked Lord (Roy) Jenkins on a number of occasions about how his relationship with the late Tony Crosland deteriorated after Jenkins became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1967. Since Blair isn't exactly slow on the uptake and Lord Jenkins is probably the most lucid anecdotalist in British politics, this can hardly be because the Prime Minister didn't understand it first time round. Instead it suggests a gnawing preoccupation with the subject born of personal experience. In the painful story of how the two men fell out after Lord Jenkins's career jumped ahead Crosland's, his closest friend and ideological ally in politics, it's safe to assume that Blair saw distinct parallels with the decay of his friendship with Gordon Brown after he became Labour leader in 1994.

As well he might have done. Journalists are castigated for concentrating too much on personalities and not enough on issues. But even quite recent political history suggests, if anything, that journalists don't concentrate on personalities enough. For, essentially, Radice's story is of how three front rank politicians of similar outlook – Denis Healey was the other – failed to cohere largely for reasons of personal rivalry and friction and how this doomed the revisionist project in the Labour Party from the late Sixties on. In particular, Lord Jenkins overtook Crosland, who was in the Cabinet first, by becoming Home Secretary and Chancellor, rather as Blair overtook the hitherto more dominant Brown in 1994 by becoming party leader.

Radice judges that had it not been for the personal friction that ensued, LordJenkins might have replaced Harold Wilson in the late Sixties and won the 1970 election; and if the three men had been able to rally behind one of their number in 1976, he might well have won the leadership instead of Jim Callaghan.

Of course, there are real issues between the two revisionists who wholly dominate the Labour government a generation later. In a sense, friction between Brown and Blair is so much a fact of life that the Opposition, if not the press, inexplicably pay less attention to it than the history books will. Partly, of course, that's because government continues to work. If the professional relationship between the two men had actually broken down – so central is it –it wouldn't. But what's new is that the tensions between the two men at least appear to have turned into a more fundamental dispute about the future direction of that government.

As my colleague Andrew Grice reported last week, Brown set out with exceptional – and, to some, menacing -- deliberation during the political Cabinet to warn that "marketising" solutions to public-service problems being discussed in government could lead to a "two-tier Britain".

Nor is there much doubt that in detail a lot of this argument is real. Take the NHS and the row that flared over Foundation Hospitals. The ultra-modernising Alan Milburn, backed by Blair, does appear to be searching for a new and more internal market-driven model of public-service provision than the old centralised National Health Service.

Unless it happens, he and his supporters believe, the Tory alternative of private purchase of health services will become more rather than less attractive. The Brownites, by contrast, are deeply vexed at what they see as a potential gift to the Tories in "marketising" attacks on the current NHS regime just at the point when money is at last being pumped in to deal with what is, after all, the central problem of undercapacity.

But at least some of it is about rhetoric as well as substance. Even the current debate raging about tuition fees is generating more heat than light. The Brownites have a strong point when they remark that the manifesto explicitly ruled out top-up fees – clearly, with hindsight, a mistake from Downing Street's point of view; and that when Clare Short opposed them – along, only a bit less publicly, with Brown himself – she was stating current Labour policy. But it isn't yet clear that Charles Clarke or Tony Blair – who fully recognise that fees would have to be matched by grants and exemptions designed to stimulate access to higher education from the lowest income groups – have yet finally made their minds up on top-up fees. Conversely, however, Brown, while suspicious of the new demands from universities, hasn't unequivocally declared his hand on just what kind of the many variations of graduate tax –some of which are anyway under consideration in Number 10 – he favours.

This open conflict is certainly dangerous. Whether it is also truly ideological is much less certain. There is a disagreement between Brownites and Blairites about how far the Chancellor was supported at the political Cabinet two weeks ago. But a number of ministers did speak up for – in some cases – controversial reform. Paul Boateng was warmly supportive of City academies in his area, and Hilary Armstrong, the Chief Whip, made the telling point that previous Labour governments, relying on the old ways, hadn't exactly been a success story in eradicating inequalities and inadequate provision in poorer areas.

It's hard to see quite where the dividing line really falls. On the one hand, no one sentient in the Labour Party would argue with Brown's contention that clear boundaries need to be drawn up between public and private services. Equally, the idea that the Chancellor, the man who has done more, to cite just one example, than any to promote the private finance initiative, isn't a radical moderniser is as risible as it's offensive.

Which raises the question of what this argument is really about. Those closest to Brown deny firmly, if unsurprisingly that this has anything to do with personal ambition, arguing that it is even less in the Chancellor's interests than in Blair's for him to be destabilising the Government. Others, many but not all unfriendly to Brown, note that his complaints go with the grain of objections raised across a broad front by Frank Dobson and a growing number of other backbenchers, and they believe that he is therefore staking out the territory from which to make his pitch for the leadership before it is too late.

Maybe it will take a future Radice to analyse where policy ends and the human factor begins. But either way, the growing openness of hostilities could complicate the one genuinely combustible decision to come next year – on British entry into the euro. It's a safe bet that Blair, keeping his counsel, isn't going to follow the example of Lord Salisbury in 1900 by suddenly denouncing the Treasury in public. For the risks of this turning, for whatever reason, into a permanent and transparent rupture are too perilous to contemplate. Labour MPs would do well to put the Radice book on their Christmas reading lists to remember what happens when the motors of party change fall out with each other.

d.macintyre@independent.co.uk