When he gave that speech, Brown was riding high in the polls. His Labour Party had a 10-point lead over the Conservatives. Since then, the wheels have all but come off. A recent poll put the Tories 11 points in front. To a certain extent, Brown has been undone by events beyond his control that have nearly paralyzed the government in recent months. Thousands of depositors queued up to take their money out of an ailing British bank caught up in the subprime credit crunch. Government computer disks containing the personal and financial details of nearly 25 million Britons were lost, causing the police to spend hundreds of hours digging through rubbish bins. Then came allegations that a wealthy property developer anonymously—and unlawfully—channeled more than £670,000 in contributions to Labour coffers through third parties. “It has been a rocky few weeks for us,” says Hazel Blears, Brown’s secretary of State for Communities and Local Government.
But the bigger issue is that Brown has failed to make clear why he wants to be prime minister. His predecessor defined himself as a warrior—in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq. But Brown does not want to define himself this way, even if he could. On domestic policy, Blair came in after the Thatcherite reforms of the 1980s. Coming from the center-left, his mandate was to massively reform public services, so portraying himself as a radical reformer was relatively easy. After 10 years of Blair reforms, it’s much harder for Brown to bring freshness to the task. While he has showered the country in initiatives—he once outlined 23 legislative proposals in a single speech—“there’s no underlying coherence to them,” says Peter Snowdon, coauthor of “Blair Unbound.”
Instead, his critics say, he struggles to have policy matters both ways. Brown’s trip to Portugal last week neatly illustrates this kind of ham-handedness. While all 26 other European Union leaders came together in Lisbon for a lavish ceremony to sign the historic EU Reform Treaty, Brown skipped the ceremony, showed up later and then signed the document on his own. The official explanation was that he had to appear before a parliamentary committee in London that morning. The British press preferred a different interpretation. Under pressure from anti-treaty Euro-skeptics at home, Brown wanted to downplay the signing as much as possible, but under pressure to show up from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President Jos? Manuel Barroso, he struck the compromise that allowed him to miss the main event—and, he desperately hoped, avoid the cameras. Yet Brown’s dodge drew more attention to his unease over Britain’s place in Europe—and to his weakness after a half-year in office—than he would have otherwise received.
The opposition Conservatives loved every minute of it. “Some people say Gordon Brown’s problems are that he isn’t decisive and he lacks political courage,” said William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary. “He couldn’t have done more to confirm that than this ridiculous fudge.” But Brown’s advisers say the problem is that a rush of bad news, combined with the stark fact that Labour have been in power for more than 10 years, have drowned out his accomplishments. “His agenda is pretty simple, really,” says a source close to Brown who did not want to be quoted by name because he’s not authorized to speak for the government. “He’s always believed in creating a society where there’s more opportunity for people. What imperils governments that have been in power for some time is that they run out of steam—or they seem to.” Not this government, says Brown’s inner circle. Brown’s Britain is the first country in the world to legally enforce climate-change targets. It wants to raise the age at which young people can legally leave school from 16 to 17 and eventually to 18. It put forward legislation to build 3 million new homes by 2020 in housing-starved Britain. The Brown source acknowledges the prime minister is not getting much credit for this agenda, “but I think this will start to emerge.”
First, Brown must find a way back to those halcyon days, which now seem long gone, between July and September, when he managed to use his reputation for dourness and a lack of charisma to his advantage. Sober and low-key, he became the anti-Blair at a time when the country, weary of the war in Iraq and Blair’s closeness to President George W. Bush, was eager for a new face at 10 Downing Street. He shelved one of Blair’s pet projects, a planned Las Vegas-style supercasino in Manchester. He called for a review of liquor licensing laws, pointedly questioning the wisdom of another Blair innovation, round-the-clock drinking establishments. By September, growing numbers of Britons seemed prepared to set aside their misgivings about Brown’s leadership qualities—doubts that had been promoted, after all, by some of the old Blair guard. Labour M.P. Peter Kilfoyle, who didn’t support Brown for party leader, complains, “He’s like Peter Sellers in ‘Being There.’ He’s just there.”
Then, as if to prove his critics right, Brown made a catastrophic miscalculation. Riding high in the polls as the Labour Party’s annual conference approached, Brown and his advisers toyed with the idea of calling a snap election. Day after day, the newspapers recounted who on Brown’s team was for and against going to the polls. An ad agency even rolled out a campaign slogan—“Not Flash, Just Gordon”— that played on the prime minister’s newfound appeal. But to the public, says a Brown biographer, Francis Beckett, “the whole idea of an election looked cynical and cheap.” One week support for Labour was 10 points ahead of the Tories, according to a London Times survey; a week later Conservatives had gained five points and Labour had lost two. Chastened, Brown announced there would be no election—and, to universal disbelief, said his decision had nothing to do with the polls.
It wasn’t just the cynicism of Brown’s election gambit that bothered the public. It was the indecisiveness exposed by this and other moves, like ordering up 31 separate “reviews” rather than taking a stand on issues of national importance. From sexual education to mental health, a strangely reticent Brown has opted to let others make the first call, rather than have his government come to grips with the issues forthrightly. “The moment the real problems arose,” says Tom Bower, another Brown biographer, “the old Brown re-emerged, and the old Brown is the man who just cannot cope with adversity.” Bower’s analysis is that Brown, long a No. 2, has nobody to hide behind anymore. Says Snowdon, “It’s easy to call him a Greek tragic figure, but day by day it’s becoming apparent that Brown is just not squaring up to expectations.”
That could be attributed to another miscalculation Brown made: relying too much on the assumption that the public would warm to him simply because he wasn’t Blair, while failing to make the case for Gordon Brown. Week after week in his political Neverland, a sometimes aimless Brown has been on the defensive. “Is it not clear that we now have an utterly dysfunctional government?” Tory leader David Cameron asked Brown last Wednesday. Brown was not about to fall for a sucker punch like that. He ignored the question and responded with a well-worn spiel about pensions, the economy, health.
But even Labour’s own backbenchers are dispirited, comforted only by the fact that the next election will probably not be until 2009 at the earliest. Recently a rumor made the rounds among Labour M.P.s that a £20 bottle of Scotch, signed by the prime minister, was auctioned off for a shameful pittance at 70th anniversary celebrations for the left-wing weekly Tribune. “I hear it went for no more than its price at retail,” whispered one former minister. In fact, the bottle went for £100. That’s not exactly a bell-ringing endorsement of Brown, but it goes to show that the lights aren’t completely out yet on Downing Street.
