I HAVE in my study at home a savage 19th-century cartoon of a prostate figure of Napoleon III surrounded by a ring of tormentors representing various London newspapers. The simple caption beneath reads ‘Motto of the Liberal Press: When a Man is Down, Kick Him.’

The degree of vitriol now being poured on the prime minister is almost unparalleled in my career, or at least, to be honest, since the dog days of Blair’s failing premiership and the even doggier days of John Major’s. Which is why so many Blairites are eagerly fanning the flames. What went around for their hero comes around for his assassin.

That might make what is now going on with Gordon Brown more understandable but no less distasteful to the public, who have rather less of an appetite for seeing their public figures brought low than the press or other politicians would like to believe.But it is not for that reason I feel that the constant denigration of the prime minister is going too far. What, after all, is the main accusation against Gordon Brown other than that he bites his fingernails and has an unfortunate mannerism of drawing in his chin to take in air when he’s tense? It is that he is peculiarly inept at presentation, at getting the right tone in his pronouncements and giving the right feel in his interviews?

That is no doubt part of a prime minister’s job, a major part in today’s world. But then Blair was attacked just as vehemently for making it too large a part of his unique selling point. He always struck the right note but, as even President Bush finally noticed, he never had much follow through. Brown came in broadly welcomed, particularly within the party, as a man who did put policy before prancing, who had come into politics to change the world and would use power to effect it. As indeed he tried, through tax and the endless measures he introduced to help people out of unemployment and poverty.

He hasn’t changed with promotion. He is still a man who believes in policies, in the duty and the need for governments to intervene to help create a wealthier and a fairer society. But then that, in a way, is his problem. His difficulty in moving from senior ministerial level to that of boss is that he has been unable to grow from a master of measures to a strategist of general policy.

Personality defects have no doubt contributed to Brown’s fall from grace. He is accused of being too introverted and perhaps insecure to manage a team well, although he has proved far less Stalinist in his control of his colleagues than those who had worked with him at Number 11 had feared. He has a caution and an indecisiveness which has similarly surprised colleagues and observers. He has lacked touch when it has come to some of the faster-moving decisions he has faced.

But his chief problem is really the reverse side of his strength. He believes too strongly in the power and effectiveness of policy measures to solve what he defines as central problems, the lack of social mobility, the poverty of Africa or whatever. Hence the package last week to help home buyers and the measures today to encourage energy savings for the poor. Hence his emphasis on structural reform of international institutions as the answer to global problems of friction and instability. Hence, too, the faux pas of praising Obama by name for suggesting specific aid to help the victims of the recession in the US (measures which Obama has rowed back on, incidentally).

That does not make Brown into the old Labour intervener of right-wing myth. If anything, he has been too conservative in fiscal policy, restraining expenditure too tightly in the first years of New Labour and proving too reluctant to step in to the financial markets when the credit crunch first emerged. Overly in awe of free markets, he failed to take the decisive actions which the US authorities, who do understand them, have not shied from.It’s not so much an excessive concentration on details, however, as an over-optimistic belief in individual initiatives that pulls Brown down. They may seem exciting when the economy is working well, but when the country faces a recession and the world is strained by Russian aggression and Middle East despair and British troops are bogged down in an almost limitless entanglement in Afghanistan, they seem (and are) marginal. The public looks to a leader with a greater grasp of events and a more sensitive feel for their pain.

But better surely a man that wants to do rather than a prime minister who wants to be. We’ve done that. Got the T-shirt. And it was a truly horrendous experience.—The Independent