It wasn't a titanic struggle. It wasn't outright war. Not a handbag was swung. In fact, it was hardly any fun at all. But a small skirmish at a meeting of European finance ministers in Brussels last Monday marked a crucial moment in the story of Labour and the euro.
Gordon Brown was scolded for his three-year public spending plans, which involve building up deficits that are considered by the European Commission to be excessive. He promptly made it very clear that he thought they were meddling fools. And the Irish, already in the euro, had an even testier exchange - in their case, it was about inflation.
For some Labour MPs, it was a political wake-up call. Here was the second most powerful man in the government - some would say that this underestimates his position - being warned off one of his absolutely central political and economic intentions. The Chancellor was able to brush this aside as merely uninformed advice from outsiders; but he couldn't if we were inside the euro.
For some, at least, the full reality of the thing sank home. It is about a transfer of power, of political weight. It is about them telling us what to do. Ha ha, responded the Eurosceptics. Have you only just noticed? But perhaps Brown's attitude was the most interesting. He is a master of the bland, story-killing soundbite. He chose, however, to make his anger and contempt abundantly clear. Was this, in the wake of Peter Mandelson's exit from the government, Brown's way of taking a Eurosceptic tack?
It is a bit more complicated than that. At a conference in Versailles a few days before his fall, Mandelson was making pro-Washington arguments, while Brown surprised his audience with a distinctly pro-euro speech. Across the government in general, there is a growing if uneasy determination to take on British anti-Europeanism. Another small but significant sign is that John Prescott is the keynote speaker at the "Britain in Europe" event at the weekend Labour conference in Glasgow (17-18 February), having phoned up the organisers and invited himself. If Prescott wants to take a higher profile on the euro, and presumably expects to do so after the election, it is because he believes the fight cannot be avoided for much longer. And Prescott's relationship with Brown is closer than most observers realise.
So, up until the Brussels row, the position seemed reasonably clear: Labour was moving quietly but surely towards the pro-euro battleground. But what of Brown? His real, private view of the euro is one of the great mysteries of new Labour. MPs talk about it a lot. They hardly ever come up with an answer. The truth, I believe, is that Brown is persuaded of the economic benefits of joining the single currency, and thinks that the economic tests can be met in due course. He has enough cover for moving soon, or delaying for years, according to a wide range of outside economic opinion.
But he is far less convinced than Tony Blair about the politics of it all. For a start, perhaps as a result of his natural Scottish pessimism, Brown is sceptical that the British people can be won over, even when an enthusiastic "yes" campaign is up and running. The TUC, the CBI, lots of big businesses, the vast majority of Cabinet ministers and a couple of Tory big- hitters will all be on-side, but even that alliance may not be enough to overpower the highly Eurosceptic press.
Second, Brown remains deeply uneasy about the power politics within Europe. In Brussels, he had a taste of what might be in store if Britain gets more heavily involved with the euro - and he didn't like it.
Brown is a man who, his fellow ministers say, likes to meddle, not to be meddled with. The pursuit of his progressive domestic agenda sweeps all before it. That's why the Treasury is so eager to exercise its control over every government department, earning itself a reprimand from a select committee of MPs earlier this month. So the idea that bureaucrats in Brussels can start dictating his domestic agenda is a complete anathema.
But does this mean that the cause of British entry into the euro has been further damaged? Some ministers think, instead, that this is the moment when it can start to be won. What really matters, they say, are the political arguments. On the one hand, the real and substantial loss of sovereign power if we go in. On the other, the real and substantial loss of influence inside the EU if we stay out, leaving France and Germany to dominate the new century, in this part of the world, without us.
Labour has had a great success on the European question up to now: it has not fallen apart. It broke into warring factions over Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. The Tory governments that followed split even more dramatically, causing the downfall of Margaret Thatcher and ham-stringing her successor. But under Blair, there has been a smooth, bland, united front. Brown's five tests have been as unmoving and inscrutable as the walls of the Kremlin in the old days.
The trouble is, this bland unity has meant no serious or passionate attempt to win the argument in the country, because that would mean engaging in the politics. That is now changing. Internal Labour focus-group work shows that people can be won round to the euro surprisingly quickly if the arguments, including the political ones, are clearly made by senior politicians. Brown knows very well that life inside the eurozone wouldn't mean an end to political rows. But as a supremely confident man who has already won one battle (over the withholding tax), he believes he can win them.
His anger in Brussels was the emotion not of a man who is ready to turn his back on the euro, but of one who may be prepared to play - so long as he is happy with the rules.
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