May 12, 2008	Monday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 6, 1429

LONDON: Cherie Blair’s serialised account of her life as the chatelaine of Downing Street has yet to tell us anything much we didn’t already know, but she does give good sound-bite, especially when her teeth are in the vicinity of Gordon Brown. She has an acid line about Mr Brown making her husband’s life a misery by ‘rattling the keys above his head’ during the long agitation to take over. Well, what goes around comes around. Less than a year after he finally shouldered his way into Number 10, it is now Gordon Brown who is hearing that deathly rattle above his head.

Has there ever been such a rapid and devastating disintegration of the public reputation of a prime minister?

We know because the local elections megaphoned the message in language that even the most stone-deaf Labour MP could hear that the government and its leader are wildly unpopular. What we lacked until this weekend was the full and merciless detail of the public’s alienation from its prime minister. The voters’ anger with him is delineated in all its jagged savagery by the PoliticsHome.com survey.

Being 5,000-strong, the website’s panel is much larger than conventional opinion polls, so it can give us a more complete fix on public sentiment and a more textured feel for the mood of the voters and how that is changing. I should declare an interest: I am the site’s editor-in-chief. The findings expose a level of contempt among the voters for the Prime Minister that must ring alarm bells in the head of every sentient Labour MP.

Respect for Gordon Brown has dropped so calamitously that only one in five voters now reckons the prime minister is doing a good job while three-quarters of them think he is doing a bad one.

What will especially frighten his advisers is the utter failure of the attempt to mount a fightback since the May Day massacre. In the wake of Labour’s slaughter in the local elections, the prime minister has toured TV’s soft sofas in an bid to claw back some public affection. Attempting to do human, he has told voters that he ‘feels your pain’. The public are not responding with empathy for his plight, but with an even bigger urge to inflict pain on their prime minister. His personal ratings have actually turned for the worse since he attempted the relaunch of his premiership.

It is not just the depth of this collapse that is stunning. It is the sheer width of it, the comprehensive shattering of his reputation in all the areas that matter to the public. On every leadership quality that is important, the prime minister is now regarded less favourably than David Cameron. Even when Jim Callaghan’s Labour government was in terminal decay, his personal ratings were still higher than those of Margaret Thatcher. Mr Brown, a figure who has been dominant in British government for more than a decade, is now seen as less fit to be Prime Minister than his Tory rival, a man whose only job in government has been as a bag carrier to Norman Lamont.

The prime minister’s remaining friends will be dismayed, but not surprised, that four times as many voters think of David Cameron as likable as believe that of Gordon Brown. They also see the Tory leader as more ‘normal’ and more ‘moderate’. That will be of particular satisfaction to the Conservatives who will take it as further evidence that their leader has successfully decontaminated them in the eyes of many voters who previously saw the Tories as the party of weirdos and extremists.

Strategists for Mr Brown have previously relied on the assumption that prime ministers do not have to be liked in order to be respected. The power of Brand Brown during his successful early months in Downing Street was to be seen as competent, straightforward and decisive. His ad men pleased the Prime Minister last autumn when they produced the line: “Not flash, just Gordon.” He liked that slogan so much that he put it up at his party conference.

This was essential to Labour’s hopes of winning the next general election the idea that Mr Brown was perceived as a tough and capable leader who could be relied on to see Britain through difficult times.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service

(To be Continued)