Year in review: January

New Year 2005 began with the world still struggling to come to terms with the Asian tsunami disaster that struck on Boxing Day.

 

As Jack Straw attended a Jakarta conference on the aftermath, and Hilary Benn toured the region, some commentators said Blair and Brown were engaging in an "unseemly fight" over managing the UK's response.

 

But if the famously fraught relationship was hitting a rocky patch, things were about to get a lot worse, as the chancellor produced an "alternative" manifesto in the Guardian.

 

Reportedly still smarting from his replacement as chief election strategist by Alan Milburn, the chancellor set out an agenda that did not seem to have too much in common with the "unremittingly New Labour" programme promised by the prime minister.

 

The row escalated when, in what seemed a deliberate insult to the chancellor, Number 10 scheduled Tony Blair's monthly press conference at exactly the same moment as Brown was delivering a long-scheduled keynote speech in Edinburgh.

 

Extracts from Robert Peston's new book about the chancellor – Brown's Britain – added fuel to the fire, with the chancellor quoted as saying to Blair: "There is nothing that you could say to me now that I could ever believe."

 

In the end it took the intervention of the Parliamentary Labour Party to rein in the warring factions, with backbenchers worried about their majorities at the impending election, reading the pair the riot act.

 

The "scorching" appeared to work as both sides buried the hatchet, at least in public.

 

In a show of their new-found unity Brown joined Milburn and John Prescott at a campaign poster launch.

 

The chancellor also gained some valuable positive publicity with a statesmanlike tour of Africa and a promise to use Britain's G8 presidency to help tackle the continent's problems.

 

Meanwhile, another situation was going from bad to worse, with the IRA being blamed by the PSNI chief constable for the UK's biggest bank robbery. The repercussions rumbled on all month and look set to prolong the devolved institutions' deep freeze indefinitely.

 

Back on the mainland, poll figures seemed to exacerbate another split, this time within the Conservative Party, whose two key election strategists seemed to have very different ideas of how to run the campaign.

 

Australian spin doctor Lynton Crosby was reported to want to focus on winning core marginal seats rather than the wider spread advocated by Tory co-chairman Lord Saatchi.

 

The scrap and the consistently poor poll ratings led to "deep gloom" and "collapsing morale" in Conservative Central Office, according to unnamed insiders.

 

However, the Tory frontbench struggled on, launching a raft of policy initiatives designed to enthuse centre-right voters with tough crime and immigration policies and a promise to cut taxes.

 

Patrick Mercer's private member's bill to give householders greater rights to defend their homes led to the prime minister ordering a review of the law. But in the end, home secretary Charles Clarke concluded that all that needed changing was the public's perception.

 

But if anyone thought the government had gone soft after the departure of David Blunkett, they would soon have to think again. A law lords' decision that holding foreign terror suspects without trial indefinitely was discriminatory and unlawful forced Clarke to examine the policy.

 

He decided to introduce permanent house arrest for both foreign and domestic suspects, in an extension of state power unprecedented in peacetime.

 

The month ended with relatively successful Iraqi elections that will leave Blair hoping he can concentrate on his own election fight and its aftermath when his relationship with Brown may reach endgame.