Freedland gives Brown a kicking

Brown's been Prime Minister for a year next week, so you can expect the papers to be stuffed with articles on his premiership so far. Coffee House will be making its own contribution, but it's Jonathan Freedland who gets the ball rolling in this morning's Guardian. And he does so with some venom. The headline tells you all you need to know - “A year in, it's clear: we got Brown wrong. He is simply not up to the job”. But here are some selected quotes anyway:

"At its most basic, [Brown] seems to lack the skills of a man who would lead a 21st-century nation. "He came in like an Oxford don, with a study full of files and papers on the floor," laments one minister, who now regrets listening to the Brownites who persuaded him to back their man a year ago. "He's a dinosaur," the minister adds, lamenting Brown's failure to delegate, his dithering, his days that start - or end - at 4am...

...We reckoned Brown could make a virtue of his lack of glitz, offering himself as a figure of rock-like solidity in a fast and often fake world: "Not flash, just Gordon."

That approach could have worked. But it was fatally undermined by Brown himself. Having held back for those first three, sunny months, he fell into tricksiness and political game-playing. So he rubbished the Tories' proposed cut in inheritance tax, then copied it. He popped up in Baghdad during the Conservative party conference, promising troop withdrawals from Iraq. The effect was to show that Brown was as much of a calculating schemer as anyone else in his trade - he just wasn't very skilful or subtle at it. Not flash, just a politician.

All this came to a head of course with last autumn's phantom election. Besides the machinations clearly designed to give him a poll lead, the uncertainty created a new part of the Brown persona: that he was indecisive...

...But it's not only a weakness in political warcraft that counts against him. One year on, Brown has to be judged by his record. In too many areas, he has been guilty of the very triangulation voters had grown so tired of under Blair. He drove through the abolition of the 10p tax band, seeking to win the plaudits of the tax-cutters, even at the expense of the poorest - thereby trampling on his reputation as the champion of the vulnerable. He has trashed the principle of habeas corpus in order to outflank the Tories on security, by locking people up for 42 days without telling them what they are supposed to have done...

...Even the prime minister's closest allies say what has happened these past 12 months is "tragic". It would take a Shakespeare to do justice to a story that combines the jealousy of Othello, the ambition of Macbeth and the indecision of Hamlet. Labour's task is not simply to watch this saga play out to its bitter end, but to act - and to help this desperately flawed hero change his destiny.”

For Brown, the timing of this is far from ideal. His victory in the 42-day detention vote and the resignation of David Davis could have given him a platform for better performances in the polls. As it is, a slew of articles like Freedland's, and the “Labour in crisis” headlines should return with a vengeance.