AS the dust begins to settle on an extraordinary week dominated by the astonishing spectacle of a former Prime Minister peddling memoirs whose vulgarity and venality thoroughly demeans the office that he once held what of the object of much of Tony Blair’s anguished prose – his former Chancellor and eventual successor, Gordon Brown?

Brown has found himself thoroughly traduced, politically and personally. However “impossible” he may have been to work with, whatever his “emotional flaws” and serially frustrated ambitions, Tony Blair’s heap of ordure dumped on the man he once claimed to be almost married to, breaks new, low boundaries in British politics. Does Brown really deserve this? And why is so much credence given to what Blair himself would once have described as “tittle tattle”? Once upon a time retiring Statesmen wrote candidly and lucidly about great matters of State and international diplomacy. Sadly, Tony Blair, the great ‘actor manager’ has given us the political equivalent of ‘chick lit’.

Badly bruised by Labour’s election defeat, and chastened by his grinding final years in the job he had pined for, Gordon Brown is today maintaining a dignified silence. I doubt if he could have churned out anything as racy as Blair’s ‘A Journey’, even had he wanted to. Instead, the former Chancellor is completing the final chapters of a book on the World economy. He and his wife Sarah have announced that they will shortly be embarking on several charitable projects connected with the developing World. This, they say, will be pro-bono work. And while I also doubt that Brown would have the chutzpah – or the brass neck – to set up anything approaching Tony Blair’s curious hybrid organisation that miraculously combines charitable work with lobbying and expensive, glitzy PR, the contrast between Blair’s drive for money and Brown’s disinterest in it, is highly instructive.

Of Blair’s bolt from the blue, that it was he rather than Gordon, who came up with the idea of giving the Bank of England independence, a jibe that goes to the heart of what Brown believes is one of his most significant achievements, there is silence from Brown.

Perhaps it’s true, or maybe Brown no longer thinks it was such a good idea.

Of Blair’s fury that Brown would dare threaten a Labour NEC Inquiry into the notorious ‘cash for peerages’ scandal, that culminated in Blair being interviewed by the police and which set in train the doomed ‘Curry House’ plot to oust Blair and replace him with Brown, there is also silence from the former Chancellor.