We want change, but what we really want is more of the same

Some of Tony Blair's ministerial reshuffles started to unravel before they were completed. Gordon Brown's first was different: it was tested before it was complete - and it passed the test. When, for example, Blair created the Department for Constitutional Affairs four years ago, it was a matter of hours before he discovered that he could not simply abolish the office of Lord Chancellor.

The biggest risk that Brown took last week was in appointing Jacqui Smith as Home Secretary. A minister with whom she has worked described her to me on Thursday as "very tough without being histrionic". Before becoming Chief Whip, in what might be described as her last "customer-facing" job as minister for schools, she made little public impression. But after the car bomb was discovered outside a London nightclub in the early hours of Friday morning, she had to speak to the nation about matters of life and death. And she spoke well. She sounded as if she knew what she was doing, which is a necessary if not sufficient condition for gaining the confidence of the public.

With the reshuffle literally going on around her, the first we knew of the appointment of Admiral Sir Alan West as Security minister was when he stood behind her left shoulder as she addressed the cameras.

It will take time to find out whether she will make a good Home Secretary, but she has made a good start. (Incidentally, the car bombs vindicate John Reid's decision to split the Home Office, so she can concentrate on terrorism while leaving the crisis of prison overcrowding to Jack Straw, Secretary of State for Justice.) She has already proved that she got the job on merit.

One of the better features of the reshuffle was the reduction in the number of women in the Cabinet from eight to five: thus did Brown repudiate the Harman Principle, by which the deputy Labour leader got that job on the basis that it "ought to be a woman". This reshuffle has already turned out, therefore, to be more soundly built than some of Blair's rickety constructions.

David Miliband's appointment as Foreign Secretary is a sensible way to mark a change of tone in relations with the US, although the way he has been hailed in some quarters as a sceptic about the Iraq war has been overdone. He had doubts about it, as anyone with a functioning brain did, but he supported the invasion. A symbol of more substance, if such a thing is possible, is the appointment of Sir Mark Malloch Brown, who has, as deputy Secretary-General of the UN, publicly offended the Bush administration.

Sir Mark's recruitment is notable, too, for proving that Gordon Brown is superior at the mysteries of defector management to the amateurs on the Tory side. The Tories thought Sir Mark, who addressed their conference last year, was already in their transfer lounge, waiting for a flight to the land of Cameroon. At 4pm on Wednesday, when his name began to be mentioned around Westminster as a possible minister in the new Government, a member of the shadow Cabinet said confidently: "No chance." The big story of the reshuffle, therefore, is competence. In the great offices of state - Chancellor, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary - Brown has given us solidity and freshness. In the big delivery departments, Health and Schools, he has blended reassurance and drive in the persons of Alan Johnson and Ed Balls.

We say we want change, when what we really want is more of the same. So Gordon Brown, arch strategist, says he will give us change, when what he will really give us is more of the same. "Change v More of the Same" was the reminder written on the whiteboard in Bill Clinton's war room in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1992. But Britain today is unlike America then, after four years of George Bush Snr. This country has had enough of Tony Blair, and it has a lot of grumbles - about taxes, house prices, immigration and crime - but it is not crying out for a change of direction. I hear Brown told his advisers two weeks ago as they prepared the transition: "I don't detect a fundamental move away from New Labour." Yet there he was, outside No 10, looking refreshingly awkward, saying he had "heard the need for change", in the NHS and elsewhere, and declaring, "let the work of change begin". So what was he on about? He calculates that what people want is the basic New Labour settlement, and a change in the effectiveness with which it is delivered.

So we get new faces, but everything about the way the new Government has introduced itself is an echo of what Blair did 10 years ago. Talk to Paddy Ash-down. Invite top Lib Dems to be advisers (when Blair did it, it was called a "Cabinet committee"). Bring in delegates from the CBI to be ministers in the House of Lords (remember Sir David Simon of BP, who was supposed to introduce the euro). Appoint more delegates from the CBI to an advisory body (remember the fun we had mocking Blair's task forces and reviews in 1997). Bring over Tory defectors. Talk about the new politics (in Brown's case, the need for change that "cannot be met by the old politics"). Rebadge departments with silly triplicate names (Michael Crick on Newsnight had fun with John Hutton, Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, asking him to explain the difference between business and enterprise - Hutton said: "I think we'll all get over it").