Pity when all that's left is sorrow

Even Gordon Brown's enemies feel sorry for the British Prime Minister. Photo / AP

It's now got this bad for Gordon Brown: his enemies are feeling sorry for him. For the first time since he arrived in Number 10 Downing Street, he is the object of pity.

Since his premiership started to unravel, a process of attrition that began when he flunked having an early election in the autumn of 2007, he has been portrayed with ascending levels of vituperation as dithering, cowardly, mendacious, useless, unstable and generally unfit to be British Prime Minister.

He has generated anger, ridicule, loathing, spite and despair.

There was a flavour of the blood sport - the spectacle of the once proud bull being speared and slashed to death - about some of the media coverage of his premiership. He had brought a lot of this on himself, but that did not make it terribly pleasant to watch.

In the past few days, we have witnessed a wholly novel phenomenon: the Prime Minister receiving near universal sympathy.

The paradoxical prompt for this change in the script was the Sun newspaper.

The tabloid ruined the night of his speech to the Labour conference by choosing that moment to announce that it was switching its allegiances back to the Opposition Tories.

I can't say I have a great deal of general sympathy for the Prime Minister about being burnt by the Sun. He and his predecessor truckled to the right-wing tabloid when it was on their side. Neither he nor Tony Blair complained when the Sun scorched Tory leaders. Labour rubbed its hands with glee when it portrayed the then Tory leader William Hague as a dead parrot.

But there is widespread agreement, across the political spectrum, that Brown has been the victim of a nasty campaign in respect of his badly written letter of condolence to Jacqui Janes, whose 20-year-old son died of the horrific injuries he sustained in Afghanistan.

It is entirely understandable that the grieving mother was made incandescent by a letter that looked to her like "a hastily scrawled insult" to both her and the service and sacrifice of her son. Number 10 Downing Street should never have sent out a letter of condolence to a recently bereaved mother with her name misspelt and the name of her son apparently corrected with a scribble.

This is not evidence that Brown is a bad man; it is evidence that Number 10 cannot aspire to even the most primitive levels of competence. It is not good enough to excuse it on the grounds that the Prime Minister's eyesight is poor, he works all hours and his handwriting is notoriously messy.

One member of the Cabinet once described to me trying to decipher Brown's handwriting and said it was like trying to read "ancient Hittite". The Prime Minister's nearest and dearest know his penmanship is terrible and it makes his spelling wayward. If the letter was not checked before it went in the post, it should have been. If Number 10 staff did look at that letter before it went into the envelope, why did no one gently prompt the boss to bin his first effort and do it again? Are his aides too terrified of the Prime Minister to suggest that the utmost care needs to be taken with a letter of condolence to the mother of a dead soldier?

Brown was fortunate then that the Sun went so far over the top by adducing this as evidence not of incompetence at Number 10, but of Brown being callously indifferent to the deaths of soldiers. If he were truly that, he would not bother to hand write letters at all.

The viciousness of the Sun's attack rather than the sloppiness of Number 10 turned into the story. The feeling that the Sun was crudely exploiting a mother's grief to humiliate the Prime Minister became widespread and won him sympathy even from his natural enemies. Iain Dale, a right-wing blogger and aspirant Tory MP, came to the defence of Brown on the grounds that "the Prime Minister was probably dog tired when he wrote this letter and we should cut him some slack. No one can surely really believe that he intended to insult the soldier's memory".

Matthew Parris, the former Conservative MP and brilliant polemicist who is usually unmatched in his scorn for Brown, listened to the recording of the PM's 13-minute telephone conversation with Jacqui Janes.

The Times columnist told his readers: "As I listened to Mr Brown's painful attempts to make headway, I experienced what is for me a new, strange and unsettling sensation: sympathy for Gordon Brown."

The Spectator magazine editorialised that "only the coldest heart could fail to feel for the Prime Minister". The overall response from voters, including many who posted on the Sun's website, was to express sympathy for the Prime Minister.

By the end of the week, his staff were quietly pleased that the row appeared to have rebounded to Brown's slight advantage. They were also buoyed by the easy margin of Labour's win in a parliamentary byelection in Glasgow, a result that Brown celebrated as a "tremendous" victory. In normal circumstances, this would be nothing to get excited about - Labour holding on to one of its safest seats in Scotland.

It is significant because last year Labour lost neighbouring Glasgow East, a similarly deprived seat, and because the win has been a rare shaft of light for the Government in the encroaching gloom.

Nothing else seems to be working for Brown, so I can see a temptation to think that salvation may now lie in pursuing the sympathy vote.There is a sort of fit with the broader strategy, advocated to his colleagues by Peter Mandelson, of Labour fighting the election as the "underdog".

At his most recent Number 10 news conference, Brown asked for people to accept his sincerity in regard to Guardsman Janes by alluding to the death of his baby daughter. Questioned about Afghanistan, he replied with a non sequitur which again asked for our sympathy when he said: "I am a shy person."

This is a 180 degree change from how he was sold first to the Labour Party and then to the country. He was the strong and experienced leader. He put the fear of God into colleagues and was the remorseless destroyer of opponents. He was the "Great Clunking Fist" in Blair's words. Pity?

That was for wimps. At the time of the financial crisis last autumn, this was again how he wanted us to see him. He was the statesman who acted while others flinched, he was the tough guy with the plan, he was the man of steel who boldly saved the world.He asked us not for our pity. He craved not our sympathy. He demanded our respect.

And he and his image handlers were right to strive for that. Authority was his brand strength. Brown never had a hope of being one of those leaders who are loved. They come round very rarely in modern politics and he will never be one of them. His best approach was always to try to convince the country to give him its grudging respect.

You don't achieve that from having people feel sorry for you. Voters want a leader who feels their pain, not one who asks them to experience his. Countries do not want to be led by people they pity.

A man to ask about that is Sir John Major.

To the end of his time in office, many voters told pollsters that they thought of Major as a fundamentally decent man "whose heart was in the right place". That didn't mean they were going to give a moment's thought to re-electing his government. Leaders who arouse our pity simultaneously attract our disdain. We do not want our Prime Ministers to be pitiful.

There are no votes in pity.

- OBSERVER