It’s up to Sarah to answer Labour’s prayers

Jul 4 2008 By Maureen Messent

HIS hair is lanker and greying by the day. The bags beneath his eyes are drooping deeper. He seems like a man caught in a nightmare, the end of which terrifies him.

Thus Gordon Brown a year after becoming leader – a date celebrated by his Labour Party pushed into fifth place by the BNP and losing its deposit in the Henley by-election.

Admittedly Henley has always been safe Tory territory, but Labour fifth – that’s unbelievable. And now poll-watchers are pointing out that no party has survived ratings as low as Labour’s and won an election.

What’s amazing about Brown is that he knows his own have swung against him, knows the plotters are whispering names of possible successors, but still he hangs on to power like the party guest who overstays his welcome long after his host has opened the window and turned off the music.

The still-hidden wish is to be rid of Brown before the Labour conference in September. The idea of his addressing his troops, exhorting them to go out and fight, is grisly indeed, given the near-blanket dissatisfaction over his performance.

His notorious temper, it is rumoured, has daily airings. He explodes as mischance is heaped on mischance but, so far, none of his one-time cronies have dared mention he step down; after all, he waited 10 years for the prime ministerial crown and is unlikely to surrender it without a fight.

The problem is that this talented man cannot understand he lacks both the charisma and ability to lead as did Blair, fibs and all. We don’t warm to Brown. He lacks humour and warmth.

Nor can we help feeling he was foisted on us.

An interesting possibility has been mooted this week.

It goes along the lines of how, with his one-time Cabinet colleagues lacking the bottle to tell him that he must go, his wife is the only soul left to convince him that, for all his mental agility, he is in the wrong job.

This possibly depends on what has been happening on the marital front for the past year. It’s no secret that Sarah Brown shuns publicity but surely she notices the signs of distress in her husband.

He is the man who has shared her pain at losing their first child at a few days old and a second being handicapp; their third is growing healthily.

But here’s another problem. What sway does Sarah hold over the man who kept her waiting for an engagement ring for six years?

Gordon was a laggard in love while Sarah Macaulay, who was a partner in a go-getting public relations firm, was noted as a woman who, having set her sights on a man, was content to be wheeled out at soirees and lunch parties – rather like Sophie Rhys Jones and Prince Edward.

Gordon was advised to marry for image’s sake. Does she ever ponder, I wonder, as to whether he would have walked her up the aisle without that advice.

She must know, more than anybody, the toll that his unpopularity is taking on her husband. Daily she will see his bewilderment that the job he yearned for over a decade has become his cross.

Never mind the possibility of a twitchy Jack Straw, an old friend of Gordon, leading a band of MPs to demand he resigns. Never mind the idea of a stalking horse to flush him from office.

The trouble with Gordon could be best solved over a late night cuppa a deux in the kitchen at No 10.

But could Sarah pluck up the courage to point out that he must acknowledge that prime ministership was simply not his metier?

For a wife to tell her husband he’s failed at anything could rock the roots of a relationship. To tell Gordon he’s not up to his long-standing ambition requires steely nerve.

How odd that the Labour Party future could rest with a quiet woman who is not even an MP.