Here’s how Gordon Brown could sweep Middle Britain off its feet and win next time

A sense of stagnation has descended upon the House of Commons. The king is dead, and yet the new king will not be enthroned for weeks. Nothing much can happen in the meantime. After delivering his latest farewell speech, Tony Blair is still making spectral appearances around the country for purposes no one is quite able to establish. Labour MPs sit around in groups, distracting themselves with the folly of the deputy leadership race. Neither they, nor anyone else in Westminster, have anything useful to do. The only show in town is Gordon Brown.

The Chancellor has been a turbine of activity. He has been giving speeches, entering debates, glad-handing pensioners and starring in one £10-a-ticket show entitled ‘The Man Behind the Politics’. The old, grouchy unkempt caterpillar from the Treasury is turning into a beaming, £135-a-haircut butterfly ready for No. 10. We have five weeks to witness this unlikely metamorphosis.

A large part of his change is stylistic. It is rumoured that his aides have littered little ‘smiley’ stickers throughout his paperwork, and inside his car, reminding him to grin at every occasion. If true, this technique seems to be working. He has beamed his way through most of the past few days, grinning beatifically even as he tells us yet again about the ‘moral compass’ which his parents apparently bequeathed to him. His only political chore has been to bat away a kamikaze challenge from Labour’s left.

But soon he will embark on a broader, more urgent task: to reach out to the former Conservative voters whom Mr Blair wooed in the 1990s. It may seem a tall order for a man who has become synonymous with tax raids and who, unlike the Prime Minister, neither looks nor talks like a Tory.