BrownedOff

The expectation surrounding Gordon Brown’s ascendancy to the Prime Ministership has only been outweighed by the disappointment in his performance since he got the job.

If you ask the average person in the UK how they would have rated his predecessor in the same job, if Iraq had not happened they begin to talk kindly about Tony Blair. If Blair had enjoyed the luck to have got in and out of Iraq after a quick victory, like Margaret Thatcher did in the Falklands, we’d be having statues erected to the man in Parliament Square.

It’s hard to remember that just one year ago Gordon Brown was considered a financial genius who was secretly running almost everything that was successful in the British government whereas Blair was then considered just a vacuous front man who did some foreign affairs work. Now it’s commonly perceived that Brown was the fortunate inheritor of ultra successful policies of his Conservative predecessors and his astuteness was largely the ability to do as little as possible to rock the boat. His own economic policies were a rehash of old Labour party mantras in which central government spends like a drunken sailor. Now that has come to haunt him as British government spending as a percentage of GDP is dangerously high after a long period of it being kept reasonably low.

Now it’s David Cameron, the leader of the British Conservative opposition, and Barak Obama, the American Democratic presidential hopeful, who bonded this weekend, and who look like tomorrow’s leaders, whereas Brown looked like he was trying to gain something by association with Obama, and not, as you would anticipate, the other way around.

A great deal in politics is about perceptions rather than reality, and the clear feeling is that Brown is knackered. He looks old, beaten, puffy and aware that he’s lost the election well before it’s happened.

As if Gordon didn’t have enough problems the latest opinion polls have his party at their lowest point in collective memory. They’re behind in the marginal seats, amongst voters of every social demographic sector, and even in their core heartlands, the normally dependable poorer city centers. It’s inconceivable that they can come back from this position. It would be the equivalent of me winning a beauty pageant, the Pope winning Rabbi of the year, a bear not doing its business in the woods; and yet?

There was a time when Margaret Thatcher was in exactly the same situation when she was Prime Minister. She was, at that time, described as the most unpopular Prime Minister in the history of the UK. I am not describing her ignominious exit as leader, when the political pygmies from her own party did their best impressions of the midget sized Lilliputians bringing down Gulliver. No, her moment of transcendence came when the Argentine leader, General Galtieri, instructed his army to invade a forlorn piece of rock in the South Atlantic, that his people call the Malvinas, and which the rest of the world still knows as The Falkland Islands.

Through luck, bold political decisions, that could have gone horribly wrong but went gloriously right, Thatcher not only won that war but also restored British self belief after it had been a long time in the freezer of history. Maggie Thatcher’s popularity went from zero to hero overnight, and she became unbeatable politically. The country owed her, and it knew there was a moral debt for this achievement.

From that point in the UK’s modern history until now there has been a growing crescendo of British confidence as success on the world’s battlefields has been echoed in economic terms. The country became richer and with it came comfort and a long term feel good factor that peaked towards the end of the Blair years, and is now, very rapidly ebbing away.

Gordon Brown, whatever bad news he is presented with, comes back with the television sound bite in which he says words to the effect of; “the country wants me to get on with the job, so that’s what I’m going to do.” He smiles without conviction before hurrying off to his unremitting schedule, crushed by what he can’t seem to do, which is to improve the country’s luck. Actually Gordon, the country doesn’t want you doing the job at all. You look like a school bully who has just found out that there are bigger and stronger boys than you out there, and that you need to improve those listening skills.

It became clear yesterday that his own party chiefs harbor enormous doubts about Brown’s leadership becoming acceptable to the British public. There are two schools of thought about this. Either they hang onto him so that they get beaten at the next election, but hopefully not too badly. Then they get rid of Brown immediately thereafter, and give his successor a number of years to resuscitate the party’s fortune. Or they move against Brown immediately after the summer and replace him with a safe pair of hands type leader, so that the consequential damage to the party during the election isn’t an annihilation. Either way Gordon gets to take the long walk off the short plank. It seems probable that it will be the Prime Minister who will make the choice when the going gets even tougher. The fact is that his people are even more scared of Brown than the Conservatives were of Maggie Thatcher, and they were terrified of her until she was politically finished.

So Brown needs a miracle or a small winnable war, in which Britain can get in and out fast. Neither is probable, or even likely and the man looks like he needs the rest that fate is probably going to give him. You see Gordon, it doesn’t matter how clever you are, it doesn’t matter how hard you work, if you’re a loser and fate isn’t on your side, then the best plan you can make is what to pack in your bags and when to leave. The country is telling you the quicker the better, why don’t you listen?