The London political village may be enjoying the notion that the next election will pitch Gordon Brown against New Conservative "saviour" David Cameron. It will be a little longer before Northerners focus as sharply on what comes after Blair, writes Fionnuala O'Connor
Politics north of the Border is short on energy, drained by stalemate and dazed by spies and skulduggery. Scanning the horizon and assessing unknown quantities needs more curiosity than most can muster.
To date, what registers is that the next head of government, on all available indicators, will have no known interest in Northern Ireland or its peace process. Blair - the less popular, less credible Blair smiling and waving as the chill Dublin breeze riffles now-thinning hair - is still labouring over the big project of his first months in office.
If Blair is out of ideas on the North, what of Brown? A fortnight ago the chancellor made a much-trailed speech about reviving a sense of Britishness, among other things; a speech crafted with almost embarrassing obviousness to make him seem prime ministerial. As David Adams noted in this space last week, though from a very different standpoint, it had the merit of confronting issues for multicultural democracies.
It also let Brown in for mockery at home, in Scotland and in London. Many commentators - in Great Britain - scoffed at Brown's suggestion of a "Britain Day" and the reclamation of the Union flag from far-right nationalists, by ordinary people with flagpoles "in every garden". Close behind derision for this American-style patriotism came guffaws at the very Scottish Brown's invocation of Britishness.
An acid Daily Telegraph editorial headlined "Our Scottish PM in waiting goes British" said he was clearly attempting to defuse the objections to powerful Scots in Westminster. Voters hearing "Mr Brown's Fifeshire accent on the news every evening might reflect that they were being governed and taxed by a man immune to their votes. They might become miffed. Mr Brown knows that he will be regarded as a legitimate prime minister only to the extent that the peoples of the home nations feel a community of identity."
Brown speech-writer Michael Wills had another try the day after his employer, this time at great length in the Sunday Times. "There are no obvious or easy answers about how best to strike the balance between a formulation of core British values to which all citizens must subscribe and over which there can be no compromise, and the permission and celebration of difference. . . We can be comfortably Cornish and British or Scottish and British or Bengali and British." Not a mention of those who are Irish, and will never consider themselves British.
In the north of this island, it might be fair to sum up nationalist reactions as gunked; bamboozled. Here was the PM in waiting, without a qualm, recommending a symbol and practice that has caused ructions for centuries in one corner of his realm-to-be.
There was some shock at the contrast between Brown's ideas and the hard-won recognition Blair signed up to in 1998 - of two major identities in the North, Irish and British, to be given equal status. For one reporter, still young but facing into his second decade of covering disturbances at disputed celebrations of identity, it confirmed the feeling that on Northern Ireland, Brown is a blank page. "Flags in every garden! Places like Portadown and Larne in July must be his idea of Nirvana." Brown's flag-waving and Britain Day had no flavour of the real Northern Ireland. Some who treasure their Britishness and love the Union flag best, who hate to see its colours trampled on footpaths or as bedraggled summer leftovers still flying in December, must have been nearly as dismayed as nationalists that the chancellor's prescription could be so shallow.
He told the Fabian Society "We should assert that the Union flag is, by definition, a flag for tolerance and inclusion." How to do that, Gordon, in a place where "inclusion" for many unionists is a dirty word, synonymous with legislation on equality, part of the much-loathed programme of "concessions" to republicans? The Brown big idea has no resonance with the most determined Union flag-wavers: the DUP, for example, pursuing through the courts the right to fly it every day over Lisburn council chambers because why would anybody object to flying the flag of the state.
Another Scot was bleak about Brown's flag. Ian Bell wrote last weekend in the Sunday Herald: "How many are happy still to associate it with the queen and the monarchy? How many care to share an emblem with Northern Ireland's loyalists?" If your ancestors sprang from the colonies the meaning of the banner was likely to seem darker than Brown, "with his selective history, would like". The anticipatory prime minister may have to reimagine his vision. As always when there are shifts in British politics, Northerners must cross their fingers about the outcome.