Winning an election in his own right is the idea that obsesses the British prime minister, writes Frank Millar, London Editor
PREOCCUPIED WITH saving Britain and the world from economic catastrophe, Gordon Brown would have us believe he has given not the remotest consideration to the possible timing of a general election this year.
Buy that and you might also accept that neither he nor his strategists will have paid more than a passing glance in the direction of the latest YouGov poll, showing David Cameron's Conservatives retaining a seven-point lead over Labour.
In these perilous times some voters may feel this is as it should be. But to think this prime minister is other than obsessed about possible election dates would require suspension of critical faculty on the scale necessary to maintain, still, that the former chancellor Brown really did abolish boom and bust.
As Martin Kettle observed in yesterday's Guardian, Brown does want the election to be the last thing on the nation's mind. But in between rescuing capitalism and laying the basis for a new global order, there is probably no more consuming issue for the man who plotted and waited so long to succeed Tony Blair.
Calling the election timing right is one of the biggest challenges faced by any prime minister - vital to his or her party's fortunes and, acutely in his case, to Brown's eventual place in the history books.
A chill runs through Number 10 every time someone speculates as to whether he is destined to repeat the experience of Jim Callaghan, who held on to the last possible moment before losing to Margaret Thatcher in 1979.
Brown emphatically does not intend to play "Sunny Jim" to Blair's Harold Wilson - winning the crown only to provide a fag-end premiership at the end of a long period of Labour rule.
Yet the polling evidence still suggests this will be his fate. YouGov's exclusive for yesterday's Sun suggests Cameron would fall 36 seats short of an overall majority while heading a minority Conservative government. This would be an unhappy prospect for any party inheriting the tax rises and mammoth costs already stored up for the day of reckoning that must follow any recovery.
It also raises intriguing questions about the timing of Cameron's planned electoral pact with the Ulster Unionists and the future role of the majority DUP.
Might events conspire to permit Peter Robinson's MPs to emulate Alex Salmond's Scottish nationalists and ride a populist tide against vicious cuts imposed by Westminster?
On the "glass half-full" principle, Cameron will be encouraged at remaining ahead despite Brown's dominant performance since the beginning of the credit crunch. Yet a 41-34 advantage is hardly unalloyed good news, given his relentless campaign to cast Brown as the man who broke the British bank, presided over a mountain of unsustainable debt and "failed to fix the roof when the sun was shining". Cameron also believes he is winning the argument that Brown's activism - on everything from the bank rescue package, to a tax cut and spend budget, to the lowest interest rates in history - is not working.
Publicly impatient for the election, Cameron is probably also privately hopeful that Brown's natural caution will incline him to hang on until May next year, by which point government promises may be fully measured against the experience of a recession some experts fear might yet become a depression.
Against that, Cameron also knows Labour has more than halved the Tory lead since September. He must also be haunted by the knowledge that the cautious Brown is also the man who stunned the political world by recalling Peter Mandelson to the front line.
Playing for the highest stakes, Brown may well surprise us again. And he certainly will if he thinks he can.