Simmer the excitement: Brown comes out fighting

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

I was in a meeting during PMQs today – hence no LiveChat this week – but I’ve just watched the recording and I have to say the Prime Minister looks like a man emboldened.

The PM largely dominated the discussion, which was on his terms and had Cameron against the ropes. At all the right times, Brown was composed, confident and in control. He was informed and substantive, and his new-found agility seemed to unease David Cameron. The Prime Minister was even assured enough to smile.

Perhaps the Tory leader was unnerved by a recent spate of polls showing his party has been unable to gain any real traction since conference season. Whatever the reason, he was stuttery, looking down at his notes for reassurance and reading from them directly at moments of his deepest insecurity.

In the first half of the exchange across the dispatch box, Brown benefitted from being less partisan. His strongest passage was not in attacking the Tories, but in defending his own policies against attack, although he was right to draw dividing lines where they were genuine and clear:

“We have taken action to restructure the banks and nationalise Northern Rock – opposed by the party opposite. We have taken action for a fiscal stimulus – opposed by the party opposite. Unemployment is down as a result of creating jobs – opposed by the party opposite. We have taken action for international cooperation – opposed by the opposition. They have been wrong on the recession, they will be wrong on the recovery.”

The result was that instead of sounding embattled or embittered, Brown came across for the first time in a long time as, shall we say, Prime Ministerial.

Cue long jeers from the Labour benches and the Speaker attempting to “simmer” the excitement. Cameron, normally assured in these exchanges, fell back on an old card-trick: referring to the Downing Street bunker. In a cute expression of friendship, George Osborne duly cackled; everyone else went quiet.

It wasn’t the perfect performance form Brown, by any means. Referring to the Tory Inheritance Tax Policy as one “dreamed up at Eton” is perhaps a little cheap and certainly unbecoming. The PM also referred to Spain as a G20 member; Spain only attends G20 meetings as an EU member, not as a full member.

But as PoliticsHome shows today, political morale is shaped predominantly by polls. If the trend of a closing gap continues, perhaps we can expect this scrappier, bolder Prime Minister to appear more and more over the coming weeks.