This game of musical chairs with Gordon

Watching the comings and goings in Downing Street last week, I felt strongly the gap between the things that excite the political world and the things that excite the rest of humanity.

Douglas McSuit replaces the Rt Hon David Briefcase at the Ministry of Paperclips! The Department of Trade and Industry is renamed the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform! The Education Department wait for it the Education Department is split in two! Were all these people and their Brown jobs really of quite such seismic significance? Can any administration containing Geoff Hoon truthfully be described as a "government of all the talents"? Straddling, as I kind of do, both worlds, I could see there were some decisions last week which had real meaning, such as giving ultra- Blairites, such as John Hutton, quite good posts. I was fascinated to learn that the new Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, had had "doubts" about the Iraq war. What a shame he so successfully concealed them from us at the time.

I can also see that it is too early to reach any judgment about the sincerity of Brown's promised "change." But I do think it is important properly to calibrate the "change" made so far. In substance, it has been negligible.

All the statements of actual policy recently made by Mr Brown on city academies, NHS reform, new counter-terror laws have been statements of continuity, not change.

Later this week, Mr Brown promises constitutional reform.

We're told he will no longer appoint Church of England bishops, and will give Parliament the power to vote on war a power which it has essentially already been granted, and which it exercised over Iraq.

Plans to "enshrine" the European Convention on Human Rights in a new "British bill of rights" seem

Calm in the face confusing. Isn't the Convention already enshrined in the Human Rights Act? Proposals for "confirmation hearings" of senior appointees sound more interesting.

Let us hope they will not be whipped along party lines.

For six weeks, the Government has enjoyed a state of grace, with events which could have been deeply damaging the junior doctors fiasco, the control-order abscondees, the prisoner releases somehow effaced by the imminent transfer of power.

But I noticed that on the demo outside Downing Street as the handover took place, large numbers of the banners were about the NHS, not Iraq. They were held not by antiwar students, but by middle-Englanders worried about hospital closures: a sign, perhaps, that a normal face of the terror political climate will soon return.

If Gordon Brown's promise of "change" is not to become another, terminal, disappointment, he needs to remember that gap between politics and the rest of the world. His changes need to reach right in to people's daily lives; and he needs to renounce things which he, personally, has got wrong.

Bishops' appointments are all very well. But if Mr Brown wants us to believe he's making real change, how about scrapping the PPP on the Tube?