One of the workaholic's worst fears is coming back from a holiday to discover that no one missed him. Imagine Gordon Brown striding back into Westminster, his fist twitching with pent-up clunk, only to find the Labour party slouching in its chair, feet on the desk.
"Oh, were you away? Scotland! That's nice. No, no trouble here. Everything is under control…"
Instead of Gordon Brown enjoying a break from being prime minister, the job of being prime minister rather seems to have enjoyed a break from Gordon Brown. Harriet Harman gamely stirred things up with an unabashedly feminist agenda. Peter Mandelson went on a kind of demonstration tour of TV and radio studios, like a Harlem Globetrotter of politics, spinning for the sheer joy of it. Alistair Darling dead-batted tricky economic questions with gentle confidence. In charge this week is Jack Straw, so natural a caretaker that you almost instinctively picture him in a brown overcoat, carrying a broom, chiding young MPs for running in the corridors.
It would be wrong to say that things have looked up for Labour in August. They are still on course to lose next spring. But something is different. During the last few weeks, the government has still been exhausted, unpopular and battling through a harsh recession, but it has done it without the black cloud of animus that hangs over politics whenever Gordon Brown is involved. Labour has had a refreshing taste of ordinary doldrums.
The change hasn't gone unnoticed by Labour MPs. "You have to hand it to her," Frank Field said of Harriet Harman last week. "You may not agree with how she presented her programme, but, for the first time since 2005, there has been a real sense of direction."
That isn't so much damning Harman with faint praise as whittling faint praise for the deputy into an offensive weapon to use against the boss. She's wrong, goes the translation, but at least she manages to do that with some panache.
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