He was once portrayed as dictatorial, obsessed, almost demented. But Blair's new appointment could prove inspired. Charles Clarke profiled

Future Labour historians may look back on the appointment of Charles Clarke as party chairman, in the post-election reshuffle, as the cleverest thing Tony Blair did to Labour's constitution. Party leaders since Ramsay MacDonald have fretted about whose turn it might be to take the chair in election year. Clem Attlee's nightmare came true. He entered the 1945 election with the left-winger Harold Laski in the chair and, after a series of "red scare" stories, Attlee sent Laski a note: "A period of silence from you would be welcome."

No previous Labour leader has felt strong enough simply to appoint his own chairman. It's a remarkable coup, which looks like being relatively bloodless - though there will be protests at the autumn party conference, which will be told to pass a rule change making it constitutional.

The real cleverness lies in the man Blair chose. A new Labour smoothie would have provoked a serious row. Clarke, however, is famously off-message. He is enthusiastic about hypothecation - levying a tax specifically for, say, schools, or hospitals - an idea that was supposed to have died with John Smith. He is against charging tuition fees to students, preferring a graduate tax.

He is large and stout, with a straggly beard and crumpled suits, in a Cabinet of sharp suits, svelte figures and smooth faces. He drinks hearty quantities of red wine in a Cabinet of genteel sippers, and is famous for straight talking (or boorish rudeness, depending on your point of view). When I rang him to discuss this profile - we go back years - I think I fell out with him, and not for the first time.

I had asked whether it was true that the iron entered his soul when he was chief of staff to Neil Kinnock; that those tense, confrontational and ultimately embittering nine years etched themselves as darkly on his personality as they did on that of his leader. "I think it's a rather shallow description," he responded. "You'll have to write what you like." And he ended the conversation so rapidly that I wondered if he had just hung up on me.

Clarke, now 50, has always sounded as though he was born to rule. The son of a top civil servant, Sir Richard Clarke KCB, he went to the north London public school Highgate, where he was head boy, and to Cambridge, where he was president of the union. He became treasurer of the National Union of Students in 1974, and president the next year. It's an extraordinary job: a young man or woman of 25 or so leads a large organisation with a sizeable turnover and dozens of staff, to say nothing of volatile politics.

His cheerful, public school, boys' own manner earned him the nickname "Biggles". I was the press officer and, on his way to his office, he had to pass mine. He would look round the door, a song in his heart almost bursting from his cheerful, chubby face, and say: "It's a great day for the race." "What race?" I'd ask. "The human race," he'd reply triumphantly, and up the stairs he'd go, bumpity bump.

Staff found that, if they did something he liked, he'd give fulsome praise; and if they made a mistake, he'd put it behind him as fast as possible. I once took him some press statements and told him they'd been drafted by a junior member of staff. He instantly bounced downstairs to her desk, so that she could see him enthuse about her work. Later in life, perhaps, he started to think that sort of thing was a waste of time - but we'll come to that.

His deputy - loyal, even though Clarke had beaten him to the job - was Alastair Stewart, later an ITN newsreader. He was disappointed when Stewart chose a career in television. He thought it far too frivolous for so fine a man. Politics, to Clarke, is a very serious business. Journalism isn't.

In 1981, Clarke became research assistant for Labour's education spokesman, Neil Kinnock. It was he and Robin Cook who masterminded Kinnock's leadership campaign in 1983. I was with Clarke in a cellar bar near the Palace of Westminster when he persuaded a new, fresh-faced MP called Tony Blair to vote for Kinnock rather than Roy Hattersley. I was asked, over a rather glum lunch, to look after media relations. Kinnock, Clarke explained, worked hard and expected everyone around him to do the same, without constantly being told how good their work was. "Neil doesn't do much stroking of egos," said Clarke.

I heard an odd echo of that this week, from a much younger Labour MP. "Charles isn't any good if you are sensitive and need stroking," he said. "But if you prefer someone who comes to the point, he's the most straightforward man in politics. He doesn't make any effort to make people like him, but he's hugely charismatic."

After Kinnock's election, Clarke looked grimmer as the years went by. I once started to tell him that they were turning the most exciting politician in Britain into a boring and unelectable one, but one look at his face told me I'd only get my head bitten off.

There's no doubt that Kinnock's office often felt like a city under siege, and that Clarke was the first and last line of defence. He and Kinnock were under constant strain, and the pressure would have destroyed the nerves of lesser politicians. "I think he was bad for Kinnock," says a Westminster journalist. "He was so tense himself, he created a lot of tension in Neil. He's sometimes boorish and sounds like a thug, though he's not a thug." But a former shadow cabinet adviser disagrees. "He was good for Kinnock, because if you dealt with Charles you knew you were dealing with Kinnock. He wasn't like Peter Mandelson, who always had five other agendas running. He may have been rude, but he didn't bear grudges like Mandelson."

David Hare's 1993 play Absence of War portrayed Clarke as a dictatorial, obsessed, almost demented figure. (Hare's denials that he was putting real people on the stage sound hollow to anyone who saw the play.) Clarke gets angry at the mere mention of it. "It was a total travesty, the whole play was rubbish."

Clarke's life had been building up to an election victory in 1992 and a job as the new prime minister's chief of staff. When Labour lost, the tension left him. The next time we met, he told me, in the alarmingly direct way he has, that he hoped we'd be better friends in future than we had been for a while.

He founded a public affairs consultancy. It thrived, and would have kept his family (he has two sons aged 11 and 14) in comfort. For a time, he was tempted to stay out of front-line politics. But politics - serious politics, as he sees it, the business of governing and changing things - is in his soul. In 1997, he became the MP for Norwich South. The next year, he had a ministerial job at education, and a year later at the Home Office. He was effective in parliament, good at mastering a brief, quick on his feet. "He's got a fantastically absorbent memory," said an admiring MP.

In this reshuffle, he wanted, and thought he should get, a big policy department. He would have liked transport, and Kinnock, his old boss and loyal admirer, wanted to see him as minister for Europe. But Clarke denies furiously any suggestion that he is disappointed with what he's got. He is delighted, he says, and sounds much more convincing than poor Robin Cook.

For Blair, it's an inspired appointment. The unions like Clarke, whose consultancy work for the TUC after 1992 was much admired; so their protests over the way Blair has hi-jacked Labour's constitution will be muted.

Clarke said he wants to deal with the great question thrown up by the general election: what can be done about the frighteningly small number of people who voted. But he is quick to knock down any suggestion that the low turnout was a result of government policy. If you privatise schools and other public services, taking them out of the hands of people we elect and handing them to companies over whom elected politicians have no control, are you not sending out the message that voting changes nothing? No, says Clarke, that's rubbish.

He may be off-message enough to reassure Labour's heartlands, but he won't be caught saying something disloyal. Is he more left-wing than Blair? He says that talk of left and right is "unhelpful". He thinks that talk of new Labour and old Labour is "unhelpful", too.

"Unhelpful" is a word he uses a lot. "Key" is another, used for anything he thinks important. The key to his political style is in something he once told a journalist: "You have to be very, very careful - if you're serious about power - about how you talk about things." And Clarke is very, very serious about power.

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