(The first instalment of this article was published in Monday’s Dawn)

LONDON: That was the core of the Brown leadership offer. And it is here that he has suffered the most catastrophic implosion of his public reputation. If you are a Labour MP, you have to be frightened by the high number of voters who now pick indecisive, ineffective and weak as the words to describe the prime minister.

The unravelling of his reputation for strength began with the fiasco of the Election That Never Was. It is ever clearer to me that this was the watershed moment from which he has never recovered. That redefined him in the public’s eye and he has never since found a way of turning his personal narrative positive again. His authority has been damaged again just in the past few days, the confusion this time being over a referendum on Scottish independence, the catalyst of it his own protege, Wendy Alexander.

David Cameron is now seen as more competent, more decisive and stronger than Gordon Brown. Voters really can be pitiless when they turn against a leader. They also rate Mr Cameron as more intelligent, an especially wounding finding for a prime minister who has always liked to be thought of as clever.

This survey also exposes just how severely he has been hurt by the eruption of fury over the abolition of the 10p tax band, an open wound that has still not been stitched up with a clear statement of how the government is going to compensate the losers.Strength was one, now shattered, pillar of Gordon Brown’s public reputation. The other pillar was his record of concern for the less advantaged both at home and abroad. He recently made a speech urging the rich world to fulfil the promises it made to the poorer world in the Millennium Development Goals. Personally, I thought it was an impressive address. It was this prime minister at his most passionate and his most authentic. But thanks to the 10p tax saga, the voters are simply not willing to give a hearing to any claims he makes for their respect as a man who cares about the less well-off.

In one of the harshest findings of this survey, fewer than one in 10 voters is willing to call him ‘caring’. Fewer than one in 10 will even call him ‘fair’. He is beaten in both those categories not just by David Cameron, but also by Nick Clegg, the leader of the Lib Dems.

We’ve also got evidence now of how badly Gordon Brown is failing to persuade the voters to think his way about the Tories. Labour believes it can hurt David Cameron by painting him as a moneyed and elitist public-school boy who hasn’t a clue about the lives of ordinary people. They are trying out this theme in the Crewe by-election where Labour campaigners dressed in comedy top hats have been attacking the well-heeled Conservative candidate as a ‘Tory toff’.

What do the public see? They do regard Cameron as more ‘privileged’ than Brown. But the stunner for Labour strategists is that it is their leader whom the voters regard as most remote from their concerns. The public think that David Cameron, the old Etonian, is more ‘in touch with normal people’ than Gordon Brown, the scion of a state school. Alarmingly for Labour, a very large number of voters also think that the prime minister is out of ideas while regarding the Tory leader as more forward looking.

When all else fails, the prime minister defaults to attacking his Tory opponent as nothing more than a ‘shallow salesman’ and ‘a PR man’. One sliver of consolation for Gordon Brown is that the public do regard Mr Cameron as more ‘fake’, though only by the tiny margin of one percentage point. The Tory leader is nevertheless seen as more reliable and more trustworthy than the prime minister. His moral compass leaves voters unimpressed. They also see him as the more sleazy of the two.

Awful as things have been, Labour people have found comfort in the belief that voters have yet to be convinced that the Conservatives offer a better alternative. There was something in that. But now, and perhaps most petrifying of all for Labour, this is changing. The number of voters who think that the Tories would do better than Labour in government has been steadily climbing for the past month. The Tory advantage in that key index of political prospects has spurted considerably higher since Labour was hammered in the May elections and Gordon Brown attempted his fightback.

In the wake of that debacle, the prime minister and his advisers have been asking themselves: what should we change to turn things around? They have not lacked advice about that from left and right, friend and foe alike. Be more emotionally intelligent, advises Jon Cruddas. Ditch ‘dog-whistle’ language and ‘the black arts of briefing, says Charles Clarke. Cherie chips in that he should take listen to Tony. Be more yourself, be more human, turn left, cleave to the centre, so cry a chorus of discordant voices.

The brutal but inescapable truth revealed by this survey is that the voters do not want to change anything about Gordon Brown. They want to change absolutely everything.—Dawn/ The Guardian News Service

(Concluded)