Imagine there's no Tony … it's easy if you try

So, the prime minister is preparing to stand down in favour of his Downing Street neighbour – or at least, that's what most of the media and much of Westminster would have us believe. Worn down by the trials of Iraq, exhausted by the ingratitude of the Labour party and now dismayed by the polls, Tony Blair is going to throw in the towel and fulfil a pact he may or may not have made at the Granita restaurant all those years ago.

If wishful thinking made a noise, you'd be deafened by the cacophony of such thoughts among the left and centre-left. Many never liked Blair, now they dislike him with a vengeance. My money, though, is still on Blair to stand for a third term – but let us assume I am wrong, which is not a ludicrous thought.

Amid all this frenzy of speculation about plotting, positioning and personalities, not a lot has been said about policies.

What real difference would a Gordon Brown government make?

There is a somewhat quaint view held by some in the Labour ranks that a Brown-led administration would be rather more "left-wing". Brown rhetoric has always seemed more sympathetic to the party's traditions, yet there is little specific they can point to that supports this idea. And, given that the chancellor has played a key role in shaping domestic policy over the past seven years, there may be more than just a little wishful thinking.

True, this is a chancellor who has been prepared to tax the middle classes and who believes in public spending. And he has a passion for attacking both child and pensioner poverty. The Treasury has been noticeably lukewarm about some aspects of the public sector reform agenda being driven from No 10 and the chancellor himself has openly questioned whether markets are the appropriate mechanisms for areas such as health and education where the end users do not carry the money. But it is far from clear whether his concern is tactical or principled.

There is a somewhat quaint view that a Gordon Brown government would be rather more ‘left-wing’, yet there is little specific to support this idea

During Labour's first term, I interviewed Gordon Brown for the BBC late on Sunday night. I thought I'd try to get him to say that reducing the gap between rich and poor was a good thing.

I asked him the same question about six times, each time phrased slightly differently. On each occasion he appeared to be earnestly trying to answer the question, but he always succeeded in saying absolutely nothing. When the cameras went off he beamed broadly and informed me with a twinkle in his eye that there was no way he was going to answer that question.

If Brown does believe in redistribution, it is redistribution by stealth. He is a long way from the Labour's traditional left. This is a politician who has presided over a massive extension of means testing – indeed means-tested benefits and tax credits are his key device for tackling child and pensioner poverty. He may not always speak the New Labour language but it is worth remembering that he is one of its main architects. His stamp is all over a range of welfare policies, many adapted from the USA: the New Deal programme, more conditionality in a range of benefits, the resistance to linking the universal state pension to earnings.

In a speech to the Social Market Foundation a few months ago, he argued that "neither left nor right has been able to contribute to a considered view – and therefore a viable policy agenda – for where markets can serve the public interest and where they cannot". He followed this by letting his favourite think tank, the Smith Institute, stage a series of seminars in No 11 on the role of markets in public services.

It may be that this co-author of the third way genuinely does not know where the next chapter will lead him or the country. We cannot know how differently he might behave as prime minister, any more than we know that he will be prime minister.