Britain looks ready to boot out Brown
By
Contributing editor
Emily Hohler Feb 06, 2009
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Brown has lost his bounce
Brown has lost his bounce, said Philip Johnston in The Daily Telegraph. A few months ago, following his first rescue of the banks, the prime minister appeared to be the man to lead the country out of this economic crisis. But not any more. All five polling organisations – ICM, ComRes, Ipsos MORI, YouGov and Populus – have now given the Tories double-digit leads.
So what has gone wrong? The prime minister's analysis of the global recession has "started to resemble monotonous self-justification", said Patrick Wintour in The Guardian. A string of initiatives has left voters confused, as "billions are replaced by trillions". Take Alastair Darling's recent announcement that the government would insure the banks' liabilities. It was launched the day Royal Bank of Scotland announced the biggest corporate loss in British history, leading to a wider collapse in bank shares. That in turn "looked like a negative verdict on Darling's initiative". No wonder people aren't convinced that the government knows what it's doing, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer.
It's worse than that for Brown, said Matthew D'Ancona in The Sunday Telegraph. This was no less than "the week in which Labour lost the next election". That's not to say that the roots of electoral disaster were sown this week – they go back much further – but that the die seems to be irrevocably cast. Last week's opinion polls have "shocked even the Tories in the uniformity of their hostility to the government". And it's not even as if the opposition has been "dazzling the nation with its hunger for power and flawless blueprint for recovery". The figures suggest that a collective decision has been made. Voters are fearful and angry, and they are "ready to drive this prime minister decisively from office".
But it's not just the voters, said Macer Hall in the Daily Express. Many of Brown's most senior ministers and aides despair of the "multi-billion-pound schemes funded by colossal Treasury borrowing" that are emerging from Downing Street every week. "The charge that he is acting like a headless chicken is beginning to stick". There is now a real chance that Labour's "men in grey suits" might have a go at carting off their raving leader in the summer, but in all probability the voters will have to do the job themselves next year.
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