2009 YEARENDER: Unlucky Brown likely to set seal on Labour era in Britain

Dec 31, 2009, 14:30 GMT

   London - The number 13 is unlucky for Gordon Brown: First he had to wait for 13 years to become prime minister and now he is the leader likely to end 13 years of Labour rule in Britain.

   It is widely expected that Brown, 58, will bow out of Downing Street after a short three-year tenure in a general election in May or June 2010 that will usher in the Conservatives, led by David Cameron.

   While Brown was instrumental in preparing for Labour's landslide victory in 1997, he stood back - reluctantly - to let Tony Blair take centre stage in the New Labour project in 1994.

   He subsequently guided the country through an extraordinary spell of economic boom as Chancellor of the Exchequer which ended with the global banking crisis in 2008.

   Despite his achievements, his undisputed intellect and liberal instinct, Brown is likely to go down in history as a 'slightly tragic figure,' political analysts in London say.

   'Brown is a decent man and the nearest to an intellectual we have ever had as prime minister. But he will be judged as tragic partly in comparison with Blair and partly because he inherited the most difficult economic position since the late 1940s,' Tony Travers, political analyst at the London School of Economics (LSE) told the German Press Agency dpa.

   When the history books are written, Brown would be placed in the same category as Labour's James Callaghan, who presided over the economic turmoil of the 1970s and the Conservatives' Anthony Eden, who resigned over the Suez crisis in 1957.

   'If Brown loses the election after a short term of three years, I'm afraid he will be in that category,' said Travers.

   However, while not all the blame for the demise of Labour could be laid at Brown's door, it was clear that he had failed to notice that the 'asset bubble' was bound to burst in Britain, said Travers.

   Entering the recession with a high level of borrowing after a prolonged period of economic growth meant that Britain was fighting the downturn from a 'weak position,' a situation for which Brown would be held responsible, Travers added.

   However, critics have also accused Brown of being a leader without charisma and a 'ditherer' - a label he has been unable to shake off ever since he decided against holding a general election a few months after being chosen by the party to succeed Blair in June 2007.

   From that moment onwards, Brown was seen in the public eye and by the media as a luckless leader who could not do anything right, Travers said.

   The perception, right or wrong, led to at least two party revolts against the leader, of which one, in the summer of 2009, nearly succeeded.

   Brown, seen as vulnerable, failed to recover from the blows, Travers believes. 'His main problem was bad luck.'

   By the early autumn of 2009, Brown's pleas that he would 'fight on' and 'not roll over' had assumed a hollow, even pathetic ring, prompting sections of the media to resort to 'below the belt' tactics by ridiculing his leadership and spreading rumours about his health, culminating in suggestions that he took anti-depressants.

   The rumours had it that Brown would use concerns over his health, and especially his blindness in his left eye resulting from a rugby accident in his youth, to step down before the general election.

   'A lot of people in this country use prescription painkillers and pills to get them through. Are you one of them?', a BBC talkshow journalist asked Brown on his popular Sunday morning programme at the end of September.

   Brown, clearly stunned, replied: 'No. I think this is the sort of questioning which is all too often entering the lexicon of British politics.'

   A few days later, Downing Street took the unusual step of issuing a statement on the result of Brown's latest eye check-up: 'His eyesight has not deteriorated and there is nothing to stop him getting on with the job,' it said.