PROFILE GORDON BROWN:He came on strong, but his first year in office has shown him to be weak on many fronts. With the Conservatives gaining ground, could the famously controlling prime minister lose his grip on the reins of power?
ONCE UPON A TIME people would hint darkly that Gordon Brown had "issues" and might be "psychologically flawed". But by now we all know he must be mad.
For who in their right mind would want his job, or fight for dear life to keep it? Every day, it seems, brings another load of problems and abuse - yesterday humiliation from Henley - alongside the recurring suggestion that he really should quit. Even his sponsors and supporters think he's just not up to the mark.
At 57, with a handsome amount in the pension pot, not to mention a lovely wife and two young sons, some would think he might opt for a quieter life. Okay, more time with the family might not quite suffice - Brown has a big brain and loads of energy still. With his connections at home and abroad he could certainly find other avenues for his undoubted talents, while earning loads more money for a lot less grief. But not a bit of it - and there's the rub.
Britain's "new" prime minister has had a terrible run of bad luck. Yet it's hard to find too many around Westminster with much sympathy for his plight. Outsiders will say this is because he has spectacularly made it so, and has no one to blame but himself. Unforgiving Labour insiders, meanwhile, recall that Big Gordie of the Clunking Fist wanted the job of prime minister so bad it hurt.
Cherie Blair was certainly still showing the bruises during her recent book promotion. According to Downing Street's former first lady, husband Tony would have left office before the 2005 election if Brown had backed Blair's plans for public service reform instead of always "rattling the keys above his head".
It seems "When are you going to go?" was always top-of-the-agenda when prime minister Blair and then-chancellor Brown met to discuss lesser issues - such as wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or, if the controlling chancellor would ever permit, the contents of the next budget.
Tony Blair himself once joked about the scars on his back from battling with the trade unions. The biggest disfigurement of his years in power, however, was the insistence of his No 11 neighbour that the top job really should be his.
When he finally got it, a year ago yesterday, Brown brought with him the promise of "change" for which the country by that point had developed a yearning. Upon returning from his audience with the queen at Buckingham Palace, Brown told the assembled press and media that on his tour of the country during Labour's uncontested leadership election he had heard the call for change.
"Change in our NHS, change in our schools, change with affordable housing," he intoned. "Change to build trust in government, change to protect and extend the British way of life." No matter that he, with Blair (and the hated Peter Mandelson), had been a co-architect of the New Labour project. The "change" candidate had also grasped one other thing: "This change cannot be met by the old politics."
Some former colleagues who knew him well had already put the British public on notice that delivering on that promise might prove far beyond Brown's personal capacity. Putting himself at the head of a "stop Gordon" campaign in September 2006, former home secretary Charles Clarke famously branded the then chancellor a deluded control freak:
"It's a controlling thing - he thinks he has to control everything. He is totally, totally uncollegiate. Can he change? That's the question." After Labour's worst-ever local election results in May, Boris Johnson's triumph over Ken Livingstone in London, and wipe-out in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, some of those ministers touted as potential successors - such as Alan Johnson and David Milliband - would insist that prime minister Brown can delegate and is loyal to his team.
But Clarke's critique went further, questioning if the "very self-confident, intelligent, cultured" Brown actually had "the courage" to make a good prime minister. "He's not a risk-taker, and that matters - you've got to be a risk-taker in politics," he said. "As a prime minister, there are many things about which you can't be certain.
The easiest thing can be not to act, but what is not understood is that not to act brings costs as well." Nobody now understands better than Brown the costs attached to his not acting last autumn, when he allowed speculation about a "snap election" to reach fever point before looking again at the opinion polls and sounding the retreat.
NOT EVERYONE WAS convinced by the reinvention of Brown last summer, or the extraordinary praise lavished on him by the media as he "endured" a "baptism of fire" in the form of floods, foot-and-mouth and two (mercifully failed) car bomb attacks in London and Glasgow. There was little he could do about the floods.
The lessons from previous disasters in the countryside had been fully learned and the contingency plan only needed dusting down.
And his predecessor had had to leave a G8 Summit in Edinburgh when terrorists claimed 52 innocent lives in four separate attacks on London's transport structure.
There seemed a fair amount of posturing, too, at a Camp David summit - where his insistence on wearing a suit and shirt and tie for what he described as "full and frank" discussions with president Bush was taken by some as evidence of a radical departure in Britain's foreign policy.
Most ludicrous of all was the suggestion that the post-Blair era would see an end to spin. That, of course, was the new spin.
"Not flash, just Gordon", promised the posters on display at Labour's September conference while the prime minister's Young Turks fuelled the election speculation. The "spin" was that the brilliant strategist was going to seek a personal mandate but would not be content with just winning. Brown, it was suggested, wanted to win so big he would decapitate David Cameron's leadership, split the Conservative party and establish Labour in power for another generation. The "metaspin" on that poster, meanwhile, was that they'd even had the audacity to recruit Saatchi Saatchi, who of course had produced Margaret Thatcher's election-winning 1979 campaign theme.
For some observers there was something terribly unconvincing when Brown had the ailing Baroness Thatcher to No 10 for tea. But the first unmistakable signs of hubris came when Brown scheduled a visit to British troops in Iraq during the week of the Conservative conference. The rest, as they say, is history.
Brown delayed a final decision on the election in expectation of a Tory implosion at a conference which Cameron and shadow chancellor George Osborne instead contrived to turn into something of a triumph.
The polls still showed Labour in lead position, but with variations, calling into question the size of the party's likely majority. Never mind winning big enough to destroy Cameron; it suddenly dawned that if Brown called an early election he had to build on Blair's 2005 majority or have his own position as an electoral asset called into immediate question. Once the polls put that in doubt the prime minister's decision was made.
That was fair enough. It wasn't shaming for a prime minister to be tempted when the poll ratings looked so good.
And he could easily have survived the inevitable Tory taunts and jeers had he not then told the biggest whopper of his life in suggesting that he had decided he needed time to explain his vision to the British people - and that the polls had not been a factor in his decision.
NOBODY BELIEVED HIM. And his problem a year on is that, whatever the subject under discussion or debate, nobody seems much inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.
As one Whitehall insider put it this week: "He lost it by dithering over the election and then being dishonest about it. It's no longer just a matter of competence, which he hopes will see him right in the end. I think it needs some contrition. Gordon insulted the intelligence of the electorate, and that was the moment when people decided 'this guy doesn't talk straight'.
"That's why they're ready to hammer him on everything from the Northern Rock affair to the lost data on the discs, to the 10p tax fiasco. There's a rupture there and it hasn't been repaired."
This, interestingly, is the analysis of a Blairite who thinks Brown can still recover and that the prime minister rightly suspects David Cameron is still somewhat "flaky . . . wanting to have his cake and eat it, while dodging commitments on all the big issues." But, the source cautions: "If he [Brown] is going to successfully plant doubts about Cameron he's first got to get back on an even keel with the public."
In the final years questions of "trust" became a byword for everything deemed wrong with the Blair leadership. The global economic downturn of course might do for him in any event. But even if he survives that, Brown must still recover that precious commodity.
CV GORDON BROWN
Who is he?
The UK's prime minister
Why is he in the news?
He's just "celebrated" his first anniversary in 10 Downing Street
Most appealing characteristic:
Hmmm, really quite hard to say
Least appealing characteristic:
Again, spoiled for choice
What his admirers say:
He's a very intelligent man with high principles who cares deeply about taking people out of poverty
What his detractors say:
He's a control freak and out of his depth