Can Brown change?

When Gordon Brown was enjoying his honeymoon nine short months ago, you would have got long odds on the Tories winning London and being twenty points ahead of Labour in the national vote share at the local elections. But a combination of Brown’s missteps—most notably his trip to Iraq during the Tory conference, the election that never was and the 10p tax debacle, David Cameron and George Osborne’s political judgement and Boris’s unique skills have brought us to this point.

The question now is can Brown recover or is he fatally wounded? It is hard to see how Brown can turn this round. Over the last few months as things have gone from bad to worse for him he has appeared to have had little idea of how to fix things.

Brown central is determined to show that the Prime Minister is not panicking in the face of these results.