Brown's bad result

IS IT all over for Gordon Brown? Is Britain's Labour government now doomed to a slow death before a general election the prime minister may now be forced to postpone to the last possible date in 2010?

It is always wise not to read too much into "mid-term"election results. David Cameron's sweeping advance across England and Wales - crowned by Boris Johnson's spectacular defeat of Ken Livingstone in London - does not necessarily foretell the outcome of the general election whenever it comes. A lot can happen in two years should Labour be obliged to exhaust its full term before going to the people. Yet there is a distinct sense that something dramatic has happened.

Certainly, to pose these questions about the Brown leadership - and they were writ large in the British press over the weekend - is to reflect on just how quickly British voters have fallen out of love (if they were ever really in it) with the man heralded only last summer as the necessary and welcome "change" from the Blair era. It is also a reminder that last Thursday's local and London elections were not, in the normal sense at least, a "mid-term" test at all. For it was only last October that Mr Brown contemplated a "snap" general election in which the alleged master tactician thought to decapitate Mr Cameron's Conservative leadership and lock the Tories out of power for another generation. "Not flash, just Gordon" was to be the winning slogan in a campaign through which Mr Brown thought to seek a personal mandate for his "new" government.

That all smacks of hubris now. The glitz has worn off rather rapidly, and in his first national outing Mr Brown did spectacularly worse than Mr Blair at the height of his unpopularity over the Iraq war. Indeed, in delivering Labour's worst local election results for 40 years, "just Gordon" has proven less successful than Michael Foot.

Can anything be done to "re-connect" Labour to voters who think ministers no longer understand the lives they live or their fears about rising taxes and food, fuel and mortgage costs, threatened job losses and negative equity at a time of global downturn?

Having failed to challenge him a year ago, it is unlikely Labour MPs would put Mr Brown to the sword even if they had a credible alternative. Yet in their bones they know - to adapt from a successful Thatcher charge against the Callaghan government in 1979 - that Gordon "isn't working". Their fear, indeed, is that Mr Brown may be destined to play the Jim Callaghan role in succeeding Harold Wilson only to be turned out of office.

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times