Alan Watkins: Gordon Brown: 'I'm still here'

For a short period – it may not be for very long – Mr Gordon Brown is in the happy position of being able to place an each-way bet on the forthcoming by-election. If Labour manages to hang on to Glenrothes, Mr Brown can claim that, owing to his skill, determination and, in the last resort, sheer physical fitness, the party has turned the corner, and a new landscape can be discerned in the distance.

If, however, the SNP brings it off once again, Mr Brown can say that he has seen it all before, and he is still there. Throughout the past year, indeed, the party and the press had erected a whole series of hurdles for the Prime Minister to jump or to get over somehow. Local elections, by-elections, resignations, pronunciamentos: Mr Brown had evaded them or fallen flat on his face after every single one. Mr Brown is still there.

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His enemies in the Government, or his sceptics in the press – or his former admirers in the papers, who had turned sour – then committed what the late Edgar Lustgarten, in his crime programmes, used to call their fatal error. In fact they kept making the same mistake, which in the nature of things cannot have proved fatal: but that is by the way.

Mr Brown's opponents persisted in giving him another chance. Or, rather, they set him another test, weeks or even months away. Mr Brown duly proceeded to fail that one, too. The forces that were against him then sat down and wondered what to do next. The answer was Mr David Miliband touching a banana at the party conference. But that, and the collapse of financial capitalism in the West (indeed, throughout the world), provided the solution to Mr Brown's difficulties.

In the weeks that have followed, Mr Brown has been presented in an increasingly heroic light. I was reminded of nothing so much as the novelist Henry Fielding's account of Jonathan Wild, who specialised in recovering stolen property from criminals, charged the victims large fees and was much celebrated in the newspapers of the early 18th century on that account, until he was arrested and, finally, hanged.

Mr Brown has even managed to discomfit Mr Alex Salmond by rescuing – if that is what he has really done – the Bank of Scotland and Royal Bank of Scotland on behalf of the taxpayers of the UK. Mr Salmond certainly seemed to feel the humiliation, if that was what it was. From what I have read in the papers and seen on Mr Michael Crick's report on Newsnight, the electors of Glenrothes do not seem to be greatly exercised one way or the other by the new arrangements.

In his short item, Mr Crick chose to try to turn the visiting representatives of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties, respectively Ms Theresa Villiers and Mr Nick Clegg, almost into figures of fun. In derisive tones, the normally excellent Mr Crick predicted that the candidates involved would come third or fourth or even, one of them, lose a deposit. In a week which had been hardly glittering for the BBC, the corporation's representatives should surely avoid giving the impression of being the bully in the school playground. So far, Mr Brown's luck has held, with a remarkably indulgent press to support him. As usual with politics, it is the see-saw effect. Mr David Cameron went down as Mr Brown came up.

There are at least two elements in the approach of any political leader.

One is the impression which he or she contrives to make: what the Cambridge historians, the late Maurice Cowling and his followers, used to call "rhetoric". The other element is a bundle of more or less concrete proposals which can be put into action and is called "policy".

What most people call policy is really rhetoric. Thus the Liberal Democrats have always had a lot of policy – with the stuff coming out their ears – but not much rhetoric. Contrariwise, Mr Cameron has done a first-class job on his rhetoric but has always given a wide berth to policy. That, after all, was what Mr Tony Blair did for his entire time as leader of the party. Accordingly, "modernisation" – now discarded, as "the Third Way" was before that – was part of Mr Blair's rhetoric.

Mr Cameron had no policy, but with the financial crisis he also lost his rhetoric. In his conference speech, he announced: "I've got a plan", or words to that effect, much as the racing tipster would cry: "I've got a horse", before taking the gullible racegoer's money and disappearing into the crowd. Harold Macmillan had a plan in the 1930s and wrote a book about it in imitation of J M Keynes. But, after the war, he scarcely mentioned it. The golden age of planning lasted from the war years to the 1960s. Clearly, Mr Cameron does not have a plan of any kind or, if he has, he is keeping quiet about it.

Mr George Osborne has suffered a similar fate, except that Mr Osborne's fall from favour has been more spectacular. There has been a symmetry with both leaders, Mr Cameron and Mr Brown, then with Mr Osborne and Mr Alistair Darling. It is a mistake to look for neat patterns. Even so, the two Conservatives have enjoyed a year of success, while the two most senior ministers (at any rate in accepted ranking), Mr Brown and Mr Darling, have endured a year of abasement. All of a sudden, the positions are reversed, with the Chancellor and his shadow as much as they are with the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition.

The voters are not taking much notice. Why should they? Still, the opinion polls are reflecting a certain shift to Labour – although not enough to win Labour a fourth term, and not enough, in my estimate, to produce a hung parliament. But in 1979, Margaret Thatcher did not, contrary to mythology, produce a "landslide" for the Conservatives. She had a modest but perfectly workable majority of 43. Until the local authority strikes of 1978-79, Labour was usually ahead of the Conservatives in the polls, just as James Callaghan was more popular than Mrs Thatcher.

My guess is that if Mr Brown sees a chink of light through the shutters, he will be through the window like a thief in the night. Among the Labour backbenchers, they are divided between being fed up with a Labour government and being anxious to hang on to their positions as MPs. The same feelings are often combined in one breast.

The most telling intervention at Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday did not come from Mr Cameron who, the commentators assured us, had announced the end of the brief truce with Mr Brown. It came from Sir George Young, the bicycling baronet who should have been made Speaker eight years ago instead of Mr Michael Martin.

Sir George said that the House intended to sit for the shortest period of modern times following the Queen's Speech early in December – itself a shockingly late date for the state opening of parliament. This parliament is clearly at an end and needs renewal. Mr Brown will have been around for 12 years, if he stays into the New Year. He has never been elected by anybody, not even by his own party. The events and excitements of the past few weeks do not affect that truth.

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