Brown does it his way

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By Nick Assinder
Political correspondent, BBC News website

Gordon Brown's first "Blair-style" press conference in Downing Street lasted 70 minutes. It seemed longer. And it most certainly was not "Blair-style".

Mr Brown will hold regular press conferences

Thankfully there was none of the PowerPoint presentations favoured by the old prime minister.

If Blair had still been running the show the chances are there would have been one showing how the frequency of rain-related events had been cut since Labour had taken power.

Neither were there any soundbites about the people's flood defences, feeling the hand of climate change or some such.

What we got instead was, with some notable exceptions, pure Gordon Brown. The sort of performance he has been bludgeoning us with for the past decade during his Budget statements.

The prime minister clearly believes he has to continue with these events, started by his predecessor, or risk claims he is frightened of the press. No need.

Over their heads

Mr Blair launched them in an attempt - failed, as he later admitted - to talk over the heads of the media directly, through live TV coverage, to the voters.

Of course, when Gordon Brown talks over the heads of journalists, it means something else and usually involves reading out long lists of unchallengeable figures (at least they are unchallengeable at the time they are delivered).

Mr Brown clearly isn't yet used to PM's transport

And there was plenty of that as the prime minister reeled off the amounts of money already poured, if that is the right word, into flood defences.

It was a strangely halting un-theatrical performance which people will either take as welcome relief from the gloss of Blair, or will find deadly dull.

But there were surprises - little glimpses of the life-and-soul Gordon Brown his tight circle says is there, hidden away.

He cracked an old joke about demonstrators outside a G8 meeting declaring, without any sense of irony, that they were the world-wide anti-globalisation movement.

And he joked with the reporter from the local paper in Gloucester that he was sorry he had not met him when he was in the town "a few minutes ago" (see, he hasn't yet go used to travelling everywhere by prime ministerial helicopter).

Hands up

But then, asked if he was a puritanical killjoy, he quoted Mark Twain - and brought the house down.

He told us that when the author, from a similarly puritanical, religious background to himself, first visited the state of Nevada he was struck by the drinking, gambling and womanising.

"He said it was no place for a puritan 'and I did not long remain one'."

He kept chuckling to himself about that one for the rest of his answer about 24 hour drinking.

By now, however, most of us probably just wanted it to stop. Mr Blair would do an hour before grinning at a non-existent individual in the audience and asking "how long do you want to go on, shall I take a couple more?".

Mr Brown, who has yet to build up such a prime ministerial backlog of issues to be questioned on, was determined to call every single hack with his or her hand up.

And it only came to an end when he called someone at the back of the room who didn't have his hand up at all.

"I was only scratching my head. It was like being at an auction," declared the said journalist as we left the building.