Just 28 percent of British voters think Gordon Brown has the necessary character to be an effective prime minister, according to an opinion poll published this week. Sixty percent of respondents say he does not. The most amazing thing about it? That was the best poll Brown and his ruling Labour Party have seen in 18 months.
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Indeed, the poll put Labour just two points behind David Cameron's Conservatives and within theoretical reach of a historic fourth term. Just three months ago, such a prospect seemed laughably implausible. Brown -- uncharismatic, dour, hapless, and unpopular -- had spent last fall fighting off an attempted coup launched by members of his own cabinet, while the Tories bathed in the comfort of a double-digit lead in the polls.
Rumors of Brown's demise seem to have been premature. One columnist compared his powers of survival to Rasputin this week, and the Conservatives now appreciate that killing off Brown may require more cunning, determination, and luck than they had once thought might be required. An election that was once considered in the bag is now very much not a sure thing -- despite the fact that even some of Brown's own ministerial colleagues concede they can scarcely bear "the idea of another five years of Gordon."
The poll, which put the Conservatives at 37 percent and Labour at 35, was significant for two reasons. First, it showed the Tories struggling to reach an important 40 percent barrier. Second, it placed Labour right on the 35 percent mark that party strategists concede is the bare minimum required for the government to deny the Conservatives victory. It lifted Labour spirits as surely as it furrowed Tory brows.
That is because the Conservatives need a six- or seven-point victory to win a narrow overall majority of seats in the House of Commons. (In Britain, a party with a majority of parliamentary seats runs the government. If no party holds an outright majority, it is a hung parliament. The party with the largest plurality forms a government, unless the minority party can form a bigger coalition.) This popular-vote onus is on the Conservatives due to Britain's outdated constituencies, which do not account for recent population shifts and are due to be redrawn during the next parliament. Psephologists agree that a five-point Tory win would still leave Labour the largest party -- even if 20 or more seats short of a majority -- in the most astonishing electoral result in decades.
Thus, with echoes of George W. Bush in 2000, Brown might lose the popular vote and regain the prime ministry. But what accounts for his extraordinary resilience in the face of setbacks and opprobrium anyway? It's certainly not the economy. Brown -- who once boasted that he had put an end to the cycle of "boom and bust" as chancellor of the Exchequer -- has presided over the biggest, most spectacular crash in 60 years. Britain's budget deficit is forecast to reach $275 billion this year, or 13 percent of GDP. A period of painful fiscal retrenchment is inevitable, regardless of which party wins the election.
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