Will Brown call an election in ‘1943’?

Weighing up the prospects of a snap election, Jonathan Freedland makes a pertinent point in today’s Guardian:

“But what happens when the immediate mood of crisis passes, and voters ask whether Brown’s frenetic activity actually made any difference? If the answer is not much, he’ll be finished. Yet success might not help, either. Voters could decide that Brown had served his purpose and was no longer needed. Think 1945: it was because Winston Churchill had won the war that Britons felt free to boot him out.

So Brown needs it to be 1943 for as long as possible. He needs voters to believe the crisis is ongoing, that we are still in the emergency phase. Ideally, he would go into the next election as Dr Brown, still wearing his white coat, still administering medicine to the patient on life support. He doesn’t want the patient sitting up, asking if all that treatment did any good. Not yet anyway.”

This line of thinking is supported by last week’s Populus poll, in which 52 percent of respondents thought Brown the best party leader “to deal with Britain’s economy in recession,” compared to 32 percent for Cameron.  Whilst 42 percent of repondents thought Cameron the best to “lead Britain forward after the next general election,” compared to 35 percent in favour of Brown.  The question is whether Brown will exploit this public sentiment by calling a snap election in his 1943 – aka 2009.