By Sarah Lyall
MANCHESTER: Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Tuesday swatted aside all talk of high-level plotting and imminent putsches against him, declaring that the last thing a country in economic turmoil needs is a government riven by internal squabbling.
In an often-personal speech to the annual Labour Party conference here, Brown sought to present himself as the person with the experience and knowledge to lead the country through turbulent times.
"My unwavering focus is taking this country through the challenging economic circumstances we face," he said.
Brown's address - in which he sought to define his own philosophy and the values he believes Labour stands for - had the oratory and flair of a campaign speech. In a sense, it was: The prime minister is running for his own job. In office for little more than a year, he has seen his approval ratings plummet and has faced double challenges from internal party dissent and from the emboldened Conservative opposition.
In one recent poll, 42 percent of those responding said they thought the Conservative leader, David Cameron, would make the best prime minister, while only 19 percent named Brown. The same poll, an Internet sampling by YouGov and PoliticsHome.com of more than 34,000 people in 238 swing areas, found that, were an election held today, the Conservatives would trounce the Labour Party, entering Parliament with 398 seats to Labour's paltry 160.
The government can by law call an election anytime it wants between now and the summer of 2010.
The woeful numbers are not entirely Brown's fault. While he has proven to be an uncharismatic leader who has failed to connect with the public and has stumbled badly at times, he is also suffering from voters' fatigue after 11 years of Labour rule. His predecessor, Tony Blair, elected in a surge of optimism and good will in 1997, had fallen far in the polls by the time he stepped down a decade later.
"It gets tired and people think it's time for a change, in the same way the country had had enough of the Tories after Thatcher and Major," said Robert Gray, director of campaigns for the Countryside Alliance, referring to the Conservative prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major, who governed from 1979 to 1997.
Gray, who was watching the prime minister's speech on a giant screen in the foyer of the convention center in Manchester, said, "When the tide turns like this, people almost stop listening to what politicians say."
But Brown surprised and impressed many people in the audience by the clarity of his message. In interviews, Labour Party members said that the man seen as most likely to mount a leadership challenge against him, Foreign Secretary David Miliband, had been effectively neutralized.
"As a speech, it was pretty damn good," said Chris Murray, director of the Core Cities Group, which represents major regional cities in England. "He set out a detailed structural agenda, he dealt with leadership challenges, and he made Miliband look quite silly, cleverly."
But Murray said that while Brown had bought himself some breathing room, the prime minister had "to follow it up with action, very quickly" to survive politically.
Rumors of Brown's imminent demise have swirled around the government for most of the past year. Each new crisis - the disastrous cancellation of the 10 percent tax rate for low-income citizens; several local elections that were disastrous for Labour - has been presented by some Labour backbenchers, stirred up by the British news media, as the crisis that would bring him down for good. But if his political career were a Shakespearean tragedy, as it has often been called, then Brown is enjoying an extremely long death scene in Act V.
In his speech, Brown sought to distance himself in part from the economic policies of the past decade, a tricky maneuver in that, as chancellor of the Exchequer under Blair, he was in charge of the country's finances. But he did it by saying that "the world of 2008 is now so different from the world we knew in 1997," requiring a "new settlement" for "new times."
The Labour Party - which presided over a boom in the British economy in the past decade, fueled in part by a huge rise in risky mortgages - is still pro-market, pro-enterprise, and pro-competition, the prime minister said. But at the same time, he added, the system cannot be allowed to continue unfettered in the way it has been.
"Just as those who supported the dogma of big government were proved wrong, so too those who argue for the dogma of unbridled free market forces have been proved wrong again," he said.
He pledged that the government would "do all it takes to stabilize the still-turbulent financial markets" and then would help "rebuild the world financial system around clear principles."
These include, he said, a requirement for transparency in all transactions and a commitment to ensure an end to conflicts of interest so that bonuses would not be based on short-term speculative deals, but would be a reward for hard work, effort and enterprise.
He also made a few pointed digs at Cameron, the Conservative leader, a young, affable, self-assured former Etonian who seems far more comfortable in his own skin than the prime minister does.
"I didn't come into politics to be a celebrity or thinking I'd always be popular," Brown said, adding a little self-deprecating quip: "Perhaps that's just as well."
He added: "And if people say I'm too serious, quite honestly there's a lot to be serious about."
The prime minister seemed to be appealing to the party's core values, perhaps those of leftish Old Labour rather than centrist New Labour, mentioning repeatedly that the government was committed to helping its lower-income people through their struggles.
Among other things, he said that the government would eliminate prescription charges for people suffering from cancer, later expanding the program to include all people with long-term illnesses, and would help subsidize people's heating bills this winter.
"It was a very strong speech," said Chris Bain, a member of the executive of the Socialist Health Association, also watching in the foyer. "I wish he'd done it a little earlier."
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