 | 'Mr Brown is so closely linked with the disaster in Dunfermline and West Fife, geographically and personally, as to beg questions of his future leadership. If he cannot win an election in the parliamentary seat where he lives, defending an 11,500 Labour majority, what hope has he in the rest of the country.' Roland Watson and Angus Macleod in the Times, 11 th February 2006. |  |
IT IS lucky for Gordon Brown that he has a happy family to embrace in difficult times.
We know that his pregnant wife, Sarah, and son, John, have helped to divert the Chancellor from his inclination to brood because Mr Brown, unusually, has recently been saying so.
A Downing Street drive to help Mr Brown to smooth his public persona and present a fresh face in time for his ascent to No 10 has seen the sometimes reclusive Chancellor beginning to open up, talking about how the joys of family life put politics in perspective.
How he needs that perspective this morning. The first big test of Mr Brown's solo political might has ended in catastrophe. Mr Brown's aides and allies were desperately trying to deflect blame and shield their man from the fallout of Labour's first by-election defeat of the Parliament.
Alistair Darling, the Transport Secretary, fellow Scot and likely Chancellor in a Brown Cabinet, leapt in front of his boss to take 'entire' responsibility for the result.
But Mr Brown is so closely linked with the disaster in Dunfermline and West Fife, geographically and personally, as to beg questions of his future leadership.
If he cannot win an election in the parliamentary seat where he lives, defending an 11,500 Labour majority, what hope has he in the rest of the country?
The gnawing fear, worsened by the shock loss of a Labour stronghold, is that his inheritance from Mr Blair may be a party and Government on the slide; that the job for which he has waited so long could be significantly less than advertised and cruelly short-lived.
How much concentration will Mr Brown be able to devote to reading stories to young John this weekend? It was not meant to be like this. The year started with what advertising executives would recognise as a bit of a re-launch. It went something like this: meet Gordon. He's a dad. And a husband. He's got a big job, but his family is definitely 'No 1'.
Gordon is a pretty normal, well-rounded sort of chap. He smiles and laughs. He likes his football. He watched Celebrity Big Brother and he's even got an iPod, not bad for someone who turns 55 this month.
He can come over a bit serious, but he is sensitive underneath. He doesn't mind admitting that getting married and becoming a parent made him a better person. He has a lot of friends. Some of them are famous. To some he is a modern-day saint. But Gordon's feet are definitely on the ground.
He can get carried away a bit, though, when talking about Great Britain, because he loves his country so.
This is the 2006 version of Gordon Brown, a startlingly different figure from the stern, introspective Scot who entered the Treasury in 1997 and whose passion and indeed life appeared to be geared around the public sector borrowing requirement.
Mr Brown's supporters like to portray the man as the most successful Chancellor, well, ever. So why tinker with the brand? Three things are happening in British politics, all of them fascinating and all of them involving the Chancellor.
Mr Brown is readying himself to become Prime Minister; he and Tony Blair are trying to bury their differences to ensure a smooth transition; and in the age of the 21st-century media the preternaturally sunny David Cameron has demonstrated how difficult he could make life for the often illat-ease Mr Brown.
The inter-linked forces are requiring Mr Brown to re-position himself politically and personally. And to help him, the finest minds in new Labour are engaged in Project Gordon: how to put a human face on the Iron Chancellor.
It is easy to mock politicians who seek to tweak their image. They all do it. And anyone with designs on Downing Street will find themselves fielding more questions about their private lives and personal foibles. This is a serious renovation.
It began in December, when the Labour hierarchy was already split about how to deal with the arrival of a new Tory leader. Mr Brown wanted to attack Mr Cameron immediately while Mr Blair advocated a wait-and-see policy. The Tories were not hanging around.
Focusing ruthlessly on a Cameron-Brown showdown at the next general election, they unveiled a so-called 'blue sky-black sky' strategy. The script painted the optimistic and 'moderate' Mr Cameron into a milk-and-honey blue corner opposite the ill-tempered, 'extreme' and foreboding Chancellor ready to pour on everyone's parade.
Mr Cameron twisted the knife with a couple of carefully crafted phrases, calling Mr Brown 'a creature of the past' and 'a speak-your-weight machine'. That hurt.
As a political hit, it may have been too good. The threat to Mr Brown had the unintended effect of reuniting the new Labour tribe's occasionally warring and invariably fractious great minds.
Since early January, Alastair Campbell, Mr Blair's former communications guru and the only man capable of cajoling the Chancellor back into the last general election campaign, has been returning to Downing Street for strategy sessions, along with Philip Gould, Mr Blair's pollster.
The meetings are attended by the Prime Minister and Chancellor, along with two of Mr Brown's longest-serving and brightest aides, first-term MPs Ed Balls and Ed Miliband.
Given the bad blood and mutual suspicion to have flowed around the various members of the group, it is a testament to the threat of Mr Cameron that they are gathering at all.
It is equally notable that those of the Chancellor's friends inside the sessions are persuaded that it will be better for their man if Mr Blair remains in office for a while, as opposed to his more bellicose supporters in Parliament who want the Prime Minister out of No 10 as early as possible.
There are two points to the meetings, one political, one stylistic. On the political front, Mr Brown is being encouraged to speak beyond his brief and flesh himself out as a politician.
His 'Britishness' speech, advocating more Union Jacks and a 'British Day', is a case in point.
One long-time associate insists that Mr Brown has always held such views, recalling the Chancellor turning to him as they watched the lowering of the Union Jack in Hong Kong for the last time, to say: 'I hate to see the flag come down anywhere.'
But it is a significant departure for Mr Brown to be saying such things in public.
Earlier this week he was giving his thoughts on the jailing of Abu Hamza and on Monday will be making a speech about security, neither traditional concerns of the Exchequer.
And then there is his image. Mr Brown's friends have long insisted that their man is easy, regular company. But they are such a tight group that it is an image rarely glimpsed by voters.
One of the great ironies is that the advice to Mr Brown, that he should reveal more of his true self, is in part an effort to repair the idea that he is somehow 'psychologically flawed', the memorable 2000 description of the Chancellor by a member of Mr Blair's entourage.
The result has been a profusion of appearances and interviews: three pages in The Sun, five in the Daily Mirror, a train ride with the BBC.
It has looked occasionally like a tit-for-tat with the Tory leader. Samantha Cameron is pregnant, so is Sarah Brown. The Camerons gave their children the MMR jab, so did the Browns. The Camerons look lovely in a family snap at home, so do the Browns. Mr Cameron relaxes in a pair of Converse All Star trainers, Mr Brown wears Ralph Lauren shirts at the weekend.
Not even Mr Brown's friends pretend that he is comfortable talking about himself. But they concede that it is a process he has to go through. 'It's clearly necessary that the whole part of his personality is seen by the electorate. He can't let Cameron have a clear run at it,' said one.
Mr Cameron has gone farther, frequently using the disability of his son Ivan to showcase his understanding of the NHS. Mr Brown has strictly limited public talk of the traumatic death of his ten-day-old daughter, Jennifer. Nor, unlike Mr Cameron, has he posed for recent pictures with his son. Don't bet against a pre-election family Christmas card, though.
This rising profile has been badly dented by Dunfermline, particularly because Mr Brown made several serious errors himself. He helped to choose a candidate who gave the impression that she was running because it suited her. His micro-managing of the campaign failed to appreciate the realities of devolved government. And his aides spun promises of new jobs that proved, at best, to be flaky.
The Chancellor signalled his intention to oversee the Labour effort five days before the campaign proper got under way and two days before the Labour candidate had even been selected when he got involved in a simmering row over the issue that, more than any other, was to be the one that completely destabilised Labour: the Forth bridge tolls. Mr Brown was to make four other electioneering forays into the constituency.
Bridge tolls are a responsibility of the Scottish Executive which, under devolution, is in charge of transport in Scotland. A proposal had come from the bridge authority that the tolls should rise by 300 per cent to £4 for a car crossing, an unacceptable imposition to the thousands in the constituency who use the bridge every working day to get to Edinburgh.
The Chancellor, in a clear attempt to bounce the Scottish Executive, said that such an increase had been abandoned and that it would not happen.
Jack McConnell, the First Minister, and his ministers also privately thought it was unacceptable but, crucially, could not say so publicly and officially until all alternatives had been examined and due process had been gone through. Messrs Brown and Darling, two of the authors of devolution in the Nineties, appeared unable to understand that the issue was not actually one for them to make a decision on.
Mr Brown decided that the Labour campaign would be fought on a jobs and prosperity agenda. But on the day the Chancellor launched the campaign, he found his chosen pitch undermined by the US computer printer giant Lexmark, which announced the following day the closure of its Fife plant, with the loss of 700 jobs. Mr Brown made a desperate attempt to promise local jobs courtesy of a new business executive training college, but those behind the ideas contradicted him, saying that the idea was still at the planning stage.
As if that were not bad enough, voters in the constituency, where the Chancellor has his home, were furious that their local hospital was to be downgraded in favour of one in neighbouring Kirkcaldy, Mr Brown's constituency.
The Chancellor had also given his blessing to the choice of candidate: Catherine Stihler, a heavily pregnant MEP who came across as having no opinions that had not been authorised by Mr Brown.
Allies of Mr McConnell, facing criticism from Labour MPs and whose relations with Mr Brown have been frosty, said: 'Who ran the campaign? It wasn't us, it was people in Westminster.'
In the ancient stronghold of Scottish kings, Mr Brown was behaving with regal authority, for which he was rewarded with rotten eggs. There is an optimistic view of the result from Downing Street: that the defeat will persuade Mr Brown to stop obsessing with the details and lift himself into a broader leadership position.
And then there are concerns in Labour circles with the efforts to keep up with Mr Cameron's image. Efforts to 'round' Mr Brown's public profile are, after all, nothing new, and they have not always been successful.
He famously 'borrowed' the three-year-old of his friends Gavyn Davies and Sue Nye to be photographed with when he and Sarah had no children of their own. Earlier, his aides set up the solitary bachelor to be photographed at a restaurant with Sarah.
One lesson from previous Prime Ministers Ñ John Major, Mrs Thatcher, Edward Heath Ñ is that voters do not mind if their political leaders are a little unusual so long as they are effective. That is one for Mr Brown to chew over, with his family, his aides, or both.
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