GORDON BROWN spoke hurriedly to United States President Barack Obama on Tuesday night as the latter made his way out of the United Nations building in New York through the kitchens – the only time the American leader was prepared to put aside for him.
The undignified image is but the latest one to draw doubts about Brown’s hold on No 10 Downing Street, forced as he was this week to deny he intended quitting before next year’s election on grounds of ill health.
For a man who waited impatiently for a decade to take the helm from Tony Blair, his time since has been marked by crisis, collapsing public support, economic woes, the MPs’ expenses scandal, Afghanistan – the list is endless.
Brown has bowed under the weight, displaying stubbornness, which has often made his predicament worse – as it did when he continued to push for 42-day detention powers for the police, and his refusal to bow to public demands for proper treatment of Ghurkha veterans.
Internationally, Brown is given credit for his handling of the global credit crisis, as he was this week at a gala dinner in New York, attended by Bono, when he was named world statesman of the year.
And Brown himself clearly believes – with more than a little justification, given his part in stabilising banks after the Lehman Brothers collapse in September 2008 – that he played a key role in preventing another Great Depression. There are times he must prefer to be abroad.
At home, however, he is tarnished with the reality that he was chancellor of the exchequer in the crucial years leading up to the crisis, when banking regulation failed to spot the looming chaos – years when he repeatedly said that he had ended boom-and-bust economics.
Labour seems destined for a sharp defeat, bar a dramatic change in fortunes, in next year’s elections, which must be held by June and which, probably, will be held in May, since Brown is likely to delay for as long as he can in the hope that his fortunes will improve.
Unlike Blair, Brown, who often comes across as the caricature of a dour, Presbyterian Scot, has been unable to display a human touch, even if his interests in global hunger and other humanitarian issues are genuine and buttressed by a deep religious belief.
Even traditional Labour strongholds in the north of England are slipping away. Extraordinarily, the Conservatives under David Cameron now enjoy a four-point lead in the polls there, by 35 to 31 points, compared with the 19-point lead enjoyed by Blair in the last election.
Cameron was publicly gleeful about the figures at a dinner this week in London’s Dorchester Hotel. “It’s time,” he declared repeatedly.
Such an outcome could see Labour lose 100 or more seats, a scenario that caused former home secretary Charles Clarke to warn this week that the party could be out of power for a generation unless it gets its act together – though his cure lacks detail.
But the polls are not the only problem. Labour’s finances are in a mess, with pre-election debts of £16 million (€17.4 million) – which will give the party no chance of mounting a counter-attack on Cameron if the latter were to win, but not by much, and had to call a speedy second election.
For months, chancellor Alastair Darling insisted that the cabinet had to start talking about making spending cuts, but Brown refused, determined to keep Labour as “the party of investment, while the Conservatives are the party of cuts”. Eventually, however, he had to bend, though insisting that Labour would not match the real cuts in spending now promised by Cameron – whether this will be an electoral advantage for the Tory leader when voters really focus on the issues is an open question.
In a bad week for Brown, Clarke perhaps delivered the lowest blow, when he said that the prime minister should use the cover of failing eyesight – which Brown denies – to justify an early departure from Downing Street before the election comes.
The suggestion prompted Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News to pose difficult questions to the prime minister – who is already blind in one eye because of a sporting accident as a teenager – about the condition of the other.
Pressed by Williams over reports that he was using larger and larger text sizes to read official papers, a clearly uncomfortable Brown, who guards his privacy, insisted that his sight is not deteriorating.
The Clarke intervention, though wrapped in emollient language, was pure bile, though not untypical of the relationships between senior figures in New Labour since they took over in the days of hope in May 1997, when all seemed possible, and new. Brown, too, has been a sinner in this regard.