BROWN'S HEARTLAND:Voters in the PM's home town are fond of him despite his dour image, writes SHAWN DONNANin Kirkcaldy
FOR AS long as he has lived, Fraser Lawson has had Gordon Brown as his member of parliament. So yesterday, as he came out of a polling station in Brown’s Scottish home town of Kirkcaldy, he had a simple explanation for voting for him.
“He seems a nice enough man and he’s had a bit of a rough ride. It’s not an easy job being prime minister,” the 23-year-old nursing student offered. And importantly, “he’s from here”.
Like many in the coastal industrial town of Kirkcaldy – which the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, once described as “the birthplace of the modern world” for giving it Adam Smith, father of modern economics – Lawson was yesterday rallying behind Brown.
After all, before he was one of the architects of the Tony Blair/New Labour enterprise that has run Britain for the past 13 years, eventually becoming prime minister, Brown was just the diligent son of a local preacher and, since 1983, the local MP.
But whatever result emerges today from the closest-fought British election in two decades, the voters of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath may have cast their last vote for Brown.
Since the UK’s first televised debate among party leaders three weeks ago, the real stars of the campaign have been two fresh-faced 43-year-olds – frontrunner and Conservative leader David Cameron, and the emergent Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats – rather than the jowly 59-year-old policy wonk. Brown has struggled to connect with voters in all three TV debates, smiling awkwardly and, for a lifelong student of politics, strangely ill at ease.
He has handled his discomfort by portraying himself as a man of substance rather than polish, and even as a self-deprecating underdog. “People always say to me, ‘You look better [in person] than you do on TV’. I say, ‘Thank goodness’,” he told a rally in Manchester this week.
If Brown remains in 10 Downing Street it will be because the nation is confronting the uncertainty of a hung parliament and voters could not agree on who to replace him with, not because they decided to keep him.
If he were to survive it would almost undoubtedly be at the helm of an uneasy coalition government with partners who have hinted heavily that they would rather not have him stay on too long. And even before the election there had been high-profile putsch attempts against him within his party.
Brown has in recent days fought back in a series of barnstorming speeches, urging voters to “come home to Labour” rather than let the Conservatives seize power. The best – in which he called on voters to “march together” with him for “justice, dignity, fairness” – had by yesterday drawn more than 125,000 hits on YouTube.
But this sense of conviction has been largely absent from the campaign, as Brown struggled to capture the imagination of voters.
In one of the defining moments of the run-up to the election, he was caught on a microphone last week describing to aides a 66-year-old supporter in Labour’s northwest England heartland as a “bigoted woman”.
His later effort to make amends by inviting the woman, Gillian Duffy, to Downing Street were met with a bewildered response. “Well, I just looked at him,” is how Duffy recounted the moment to a British tabloid. “I didn’t like to say it, but all I could think was, ‘I don’t think you’ll be there’.” After a long and hard campaign, an exit was a prospect even Brown’s supporters in Kirkcaldy were being forced to contemplate yesterday.
“People don’t want him to bow out. People want him to carry on fighting,” said Judy Hamilton, a local Labour councillor. “But there’s a big national picture to take into consideration. He’s not just our MP. He’s prime minister.”