PM isolated as ministers decide: 'Brown can't win'

"Be careful what you wish for as you might just get it" could have been a phrase invented to warn Gordon Brown about his long stated wish to inherit Tony Blair's premiership. He started with a relatively good couple of weeks during which he came across as sober and statesmanlike, but it's very quickly come apart and turned into an almost invisible premiership.

With the recent dreadful results from Crewe and Nantwich, it was inevitable that there would be calls for him to stand down.

"People are not far away from thinking that we cannot win under Gordon Brown," a senior Labour figure said last night. "We wish it was different from what it is. But it is hard to avoid looking at the facts."

The growing collapse in confidence in Brown's leadership became clear yesterday in the wake of Labour's poor byelection performance as the Tories won on a swing of 17.6% - the sort of figure that would place David Cameron in Downing Street with a susbstantial majority.

Had the byelection happened on its own, Brown would probably face no more than a whispering campaign, senior sources say. But two factors are convincing cabinet ministers that Labour's poor performance is directly linked to the prime minister: the local election reverses earlier this month, and Brown's decision to give away £2.7bn in tax cuts in an emergency mini-budget designed to solve the crisis provoked by the abolition of the 10p starting rate of tax in his last budget as chancellor last year.

The mini-budget was intended to wrongfoot the Tories and avoid a parliamentary crisis that would have been provoked if Labour rebels had voted down the finance bill. "Gordon threw £2.7bn at this and the result in Crewe and Nantwich was worse than we feared," the senior party figure said.

Many of us had hoped that a Brown premiership would be very different from the Blair one, and have been bitterly disappointed to watch Brown push forward on Blairite principles like the 42 day extension for holding terrorist suspects.

All of which makes me feel less inclined to defend him when he finds himself under this kind of attack.

Brown could be a great Prime Minister if he finds his own voice rather than simply presenting himself as a continuation of Blair. Maybe he's been conning us all these years by promising that he offers an alternative to Blair, or maybe we simply imagined that this was what he was offering because that's what we wanted to believe.

Either way, I am disinclined to defend him as my disappointment in him is profound.

If he carries on the way he is going then Labour are guaranteed to lose the next election. If people want a Tory, then they'll vote for Cameron. They won't vote for a Labour government which is offering Tory-Lite policies.

Brown needs to find his voice. He needs to point out the differences between Labour and Conservative principles. At the moment, under his style of leadership, there appears to be none.

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Tags: Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Labour, Conservatives, UK politics