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Thursday 4 December 2008

Gordon Brown will lose his lustre

Don’t go greener or get meaner, Mr Cameron

Key insights from the top American pollster

But all is not smooth sailing for Mr Brown. At that recent Newsnight session I also heard the rumblings of the coming discontent, of a Cinderella story approaching its end. From ‘Very Old Labour’ to ‘haven’t we learned our lesson yet?’, there is the sense that his new appeal has a clearly stamped sell-by date — and he’s getting pretty close. Consider the words of those who would back him again: ‘He’s not messed it up — that’s about the best you can say,’ and, ‘We’re not condemning him, but we are sceptical.’ If this was a honeymoon, Gordon would have packed his bags for the flight home to Kirkcaldy before Prudence had even taken her pullover off.

It is simply too early for the non-aligned floating voter to reject Brown in the same way that they did Tony Blair, or John Major in 1997. But there is no sense of overwhelming endorsement coming through either. Even his achievements end up polluted by the public’s general grievances with ten years of missed Labour opportunities and heightened expectations that were never met. After a decade in office, the list of complaints with Labour is growing exponentially. Like the great W.E. Gladstone, Mr Brown really should be an old man in a hurry.

Still, the ‘Brown bounce’ lives on, at least for now, and has been complemented by a three-month ‘Dave dive’. The words of the floaters from my Newsnight panel are once again revealing. There’s a curiosity that remains about Mr Cameron, but with it a demand for detail that has them recalling the worst of Blair’s superficiality: ‘there’s never any specifics with him’, ‘too much point-scoring’, and, ‘talks too much about what’s gone wrong’. He is falling into the classic trap of opposition. Only being able to talk while governments can act: as I argued back in April, ‘It is just not enough for Mr Cameron to oppose, he must propose.’ It’s not what he’s against but what he is for that people need to hear before they can vote for him.

More articles from: Frank Luntz | this section

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