Bruce Anderson: Labour MPs thought that Brown was a lion. Now they are fearful that he is but a mouse

In Chequers, there is a painting by Snyders of a lion caught in hunters' nets, and there is a story attached to it. It is said that when Churchill was chatelain of the house during the war, he could not bear the sight of this magnificent beast ensnared and doomed, especially when the British lion was in mortal peril. So in the bottom right-hand corner he painted a mouse, gnawing away at the strands of rope. A charming tale, except that I remember an almost identical Snyders somewhere on the continent – he is a much attributed artist – with a similar mouse. It is unlikely that Churchill did that one.

If our PM ever looks at pictures, one wonders what he thinks of the lion and the mouse. Has he spotted the dual resemblance? He too looks like a great beast, trapped and helpless, thrashing around to no avail. But many of his own followers also wonder whether the leader whom they regarded as a lion is only a mouse.

There has certainly been plenty of diminutive behaviour. As Chancellor, Mr Brown bullied and humiliated Cabinet colleagues whom he judged to be in his way. Indeed, he was barely more civil to Tony Blair. In Tom Bower's indispensable biography, there are extraordinary accounts of meetings in Number 10 at which Gordon Brown would talk loudly to Ed Balls while some visitor was trying to brief the PM. No Prime Minister in history put up with as much rudeness from a colleague than Tony Blair chose to endure from Gordon Brown, and it is hard to think of any who would have (Goderich, perhaps: he used to cry a lot).

Well, the whirligig of time has now brought in his revenges. Gordon Brown is being repaid in full for all those insults. Parliamentary private secretaries are hermaphrodites. They have the obligations of a minister without the salary: the status of a backbencher without the freedom. To invert Baldwin's remark about the harlot's prerogative, PPSs have responsibility without power. They accept the life because it can be a useful political apprenticeship. But the terms of engagement are clear. Any overt disloyalty to the government and you are out.

Not any more. Over the past week, the clunking fist which used to resound across Whitehall has been gathering rust while a succession PPSs queued up to voice their complaints. No previous PM has ever put up with anything like this amount of cheek from junior parliamentarians. The Blairites must have been loving it.

The Prime Minister is about to see the President of the United States, but wait – there is a crisis. Angela Smith, a PPS, is threatening to resign. Everything has to stop. The Prime Minister has to telephone her. General relief: crisis over: Miss Smith has condescended to stay on. The PM can now turn his attention to lesser matters, such as the UN, the G8, the IMF, the special relationship and the World Bank. To his surprise, no one paid much attention to his views on those topics. But there should have been no surprise. People have come to rate him at his proper valuation. He is not a global institutions PM, more a "please, Angela, don't resign'' one.

John Major was a much troubled Prime Minister who never claimed to have a clunking fist and who was, if anything, excessively tolerant. Yet he took the whip away from revolting back benchers. A PPS who had behaved like Miss Smith would have received a telephone call, but not from Mr Major. It would have been the Chief Whip, informing her that her resignation had been accepted. Angela. Smith should have been told that a ticket awaited her at the airport. She was to join the Prime Minister's party in Washington. Ted Kennedy would give her a lift to Chappaquiddick.

Mr Brown has not drowned, yet. But there are three reasons for believing that there will be no lifebelt: the economy's problems, his own personality and the public's view of the state.

If the economy turns sour, modern governments will find a bottle of whisky and a revolver in the library. With the decline of tribalism, voters behave like the new owners of a troubled company. However plausibly the old directors talk about difficulties and global markets, however eager their plans for recovery – out they go. It took Neil Kinnock to lose the 1992 election. Gordon Brown insists that the good days will return, but he sounds like Dr Pangloss reading one of Stalin's five-year plans. Yet the tongues of men and angels would not save him. In a recession, it would be hard for an incumbent government to win even if its leader was a combination of Einstein, Wittgenstein and Frankenstein's monster.

Which brings us back to Gordon Brown, who looks more and more like an attempt by Dr Frankenstein to redesign his monster as a pantomime horse. A year ago, Mr Brown promised strength, decisiveness and integrity. What can he now replace them with: charm? A year ago, we were told that the era of spin was over. Since Christmas, the PM has hired a spin doctor every two weeks, at a cost to the taxpayer of £1.75m a year. It is not clear what they all do. At the British Press Awards, one of them was telling everyone that she was responsible for booking hotel rooms for Gordon's Brown's driver and Sarah Brown's hairdresser. It all seems a long way from "not flash, just Gordon''. The new slogan is "A spinner a day keeps the voters at bay''.

The voters may have to put up with this for another two years. This gives them plenty of time to change their minds. But there is no reason to believe that they will do so. If the travails of the economy and his own personality were not enough to finish him, Gordon Brown is also at odds with the temper of the times.

He used to be a socialist: that is clear from his own early writings. He also knew the socialist classics, which impressed Neil Kinnock. Mr Kinnock carried the books around, but there was a limit to what can be absorbed via the armpit. Mr Brown not only bought them: he read them. Tony Blair had not even heard of most of them.

Although Gordon Brown may still claim to be a socialist, that is a bit like an Anglican clergyman who denies the truth of the resurrection but still insists that he is a Christian. In reality, our PM is a statist. He profoundly believes in using the power of the state to control society, and individual's lives. That's what puts him at odds with many voters' experience.

A lot of the public have come to regard the state as another Frankenstein product. In this case, it is a combination of monster and pantomime horse: bossy where it has no business interfering but weak where it is desperately needed. Above all, it has lost contact with common sense and the reality of most people's lives. A 19-year-old boy with Down's Syndrome and a mental age of five pushes an Asian girl. The police spend seven months trying to assemble evidence for a charge of racially-aggravated assault. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

But Gordon Brown cannot correct the state's failures. He is responsible for far too many of them. Indeed, confronted with the evidence of state malfunction, he has only one truthful reply: "L'état, c'est moi".

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