They're guilty of underestimating the importance of rising industrial output and good levels of investment to the long-term economic future. So it's important for us that we pay greater attention to the needs and desires of industry."This may not mean a return to state funding, but Mr Brown is noticeably less enamoured of the Thatcher economic "miracle" than Mr Blair is of other Tory changes of the 1980s. Asked whether the country would have been better if Labour had won the 1983 election, Mr Brown attacks the boom-bust stewardship of Nigel Lawson. He describes Conservative macro- economic management as "incompetence hidebound to ideology", adding: "Where they have things right we acknowledge it."The first priority, however, will be the welfare-to-work taskforce that will spend the proceeds of Labour's windfall tax on the privatised utilities Mr Brown will chair a Cabinet sub-committee on the issue.

There will be a Cabinet-rank minister, reporting to David Blunkett - a new creature in politics, something akin to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. The campaign to get young people back to work, and revive the work psychology of a generation, a fundamental part of Mr Brown's philosophy, will begin immediately.But first there is the little matter of the election. The shadow Chancellor will attend the count in Lochgelly town hall in his constituency, Dunfermline East, one of Labour's safest seats. By midnight, when his result is known, the trend will be clear, and it will either be a charter jet to Westminster and triumph, or a cab ride to his Fife home and a big political headache.. With a campaign no deeper in its content than the layer of pancake that Tony Blair wears for his press briefing each morning, the Labour Party has had to rely on its powers of intimidation to persuade the media of its electabilty These are considerable. Hardly a day has passed in the last five weeks without one of the trio of campaign managers - Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell and Dave Hill - calling an editor to deliver a mixture of wheedling abuse and bald threat "It's poison," a senior broadcaster said: "Utter poison. If they're like this now, what the hell are they going to do when they get into power?" The answer is almost certainly: more of the same.

Celebration will shift in a blink of an eye to triumphalism when Campbell finds himself at the centre of the power, with many of his former colleagues from the press in his sway. And Mandelson and Hill cannot be expected to reform their habits of the last three years, or to let their skills of manipulation and news management slide. They have grown used to getting their own way, addicted to the late-night call that hints at permanent exile from New Labour's favour; of excommunication from the inside track; and above all at the ridicule that will be heaped on a journalist by colleagues, if he or she does not see it their way. "You'll look c---s if you go for the Lib Dems" was how Alastair Campbell put it in a telephone call to a senior figure on the Guardian 10 days ago after he had heard that some there thought the paper should endorse Paddy Ashdown. The call came two hours after the meeting had ended, which shows there are people willing to betray their own organisation in order to ingratiate themselves with the new political establishment. For journalists, an incoming government represents new supplies of patronage in the shape of stories, advance tips, and fleeting access to the cockpit of the revolution. They are as susceptible to this sort of flattery as any of the unlikely business grandees that have recently stepped before the cameras to reveal their rebirth as Blairites.There is an atmoshpere of fierce invigilation about the Mandelson-Campbell- Hill operation, which is, perhaps, understandable, given the press bias of the past.