祥瑞新生印刷厂

Byline: QUENTIN LETTS

HIS gaze was as watery as that of an old labrador panting under a summer willow. If anything, he has put on weight over the summer, the chins jowlier, the cheeks and hands puffy.

Beads of sweat formed on his upper lip. His brown suede shoes sat on his lower paws like two squashed pasties.

All this merely added to the image. Kenneth Clarke was presenting himself as the very antithesis of youth and inexperience. No gizmos. No gaucheness.

The former Chancellor's performance in Westminster yesterday was a serious affair. It was saying to the world: 'Here I am, a statesman, seen it all before, weathered in the ways of the world. Can you dare not pick me as your leader?' It was a good speech, a long speech, wide-ranging in content and references. In one paragraph he associated himself with the late Robin Cook.

In the next Embroidered Patches he was roping in Margaret Thatcher. If anyone can combine the antiwar and the libertarian votes, Mr Clarke may be the man. There were comradely nods to Sir John Major, William Hague, Sir Malcolm Rifkind and to the numerous colleagues, Mr Clarke sadly reflected, whom he had lost to the IRA during its bombing campaigns. All this was intended to portray him as a man of open tastes and hard-won experience.

His audience was nothing more than a hundred or so reporters, many of them from the Foreign Press Association. He made them sit through an hour of intelligent analysis of Tony Blair's warfaring disasters.

If it had been merely British reporters he might have found himself being heckled to an early finish. Being foreigners (Germans, Americans, Italians) this crowd was more high-minded. In the wood-lined room, not far from the Treasury, there was no background slogan of the 'Forward Not Backward' or 'Are You Thinking What We're Thinking?' variety.

There was no blue-themed livery at his shoulder, no introductory music, nor even a throng of supportive parliamentarians to provide enthusiastic applause, as one normally finds at Tory leadership campaign launches.

God knows, I've been to enough of these damn things since 1997.

This one did seem rather refreshingly free of innovation.

Such modern fandango (or ' flapdoodle', to use an intriguing term he flashed yesterday) is not the Clarke way. If a Peter Mandelson or Alastair Campbell had been organising his speech yesterday it would have included bullet-point breakdowns of his main points, verbless sentences, a precis for the TV pundits, an easy soundbite for the lunchtime news bulletins.

Instead, Mr Clarke just stood there in front of a marble fireplace, cast his milky, dark-blue eyes at the cameras, and slowly let rip that he thought Tony Blair was 'bogus' on the war.

He is one of the few people left who can patronise the young Lochinvar Blair, and he did it yesterday to decent effect.

He noted repeatedly, but with a faint air of throwaway so that it did not seem boastful, that he had been a Home Secretary many cheap coach purses moons ago. He remembered that he had encountered silly, liberal quibbles from his Labour shadow.

The name of that shadow minister? Blair.

The current Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, was also mentioned. He did not seem to think much of his near namesake but he was not so coarse as to insu
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