Gordon Brown is having a horrid time. Boris Johnson is mayor of London, and the Crewe and Nantwich by-election results fill Brown’s cup of bile to brimming. Windows of opportunity for popularity boosts are few and far between before the summer holidays, and the annual accounting of the Labour Party conference comes hot on the heels of the parliamentary recess. The style and substance of Brown’s leadership both stand against him; his is not a personality that can charm errant voters with reserves of careless chutzpah squirreled away for use in adversity. We see a man beleaguered, gloomy and angry, an image unlikely to regenerate a leadership as doomed as that of Michael Foot.

Foot, of course, never became prime minister. Elected as a peacemaker, he lost every battle with the trades unions and led the party to a miserable result in the 1983 general election, beaten to third place by the Liberal Democrat/SDP alliance as a rampant Margaret Thatcher crested the wave with a majority of 144. Foot sank back — with relief, one imagines — into old-fashioned, North London, socialist, intellectual life and into the typical retrospective affection and respect of the British public for a brilliant, if eccentric, loser.

Gordon Brown has been wrong-footed from the outset. We do not expect our leaders to be appointed or anointed and the taint of insider-dealing, sidelining the voters as of secondary importance, meant that this leadership had something to prove and little time to do it. Brown shied away from his opportunity to cement his position in a general election last autumn and things have gone downhill ever since. We cannot like the man, however much we respected the chancellor, and we will not trust a leader foisted on us and unable or unwilling to allow us an opinion. Now everything is against Brown, from his all-too-obvious discomfort in the public eye to national consequences from international events and especially a major economic downturn. Huge oil and petrol price rises give us reason to blame the government every time we fill our cars at the petrol pump. Not many months ago, I was shocked to pay £60 to fill my car with diesel, an all-time-high; this week it cost me over £80.

Brown’s platform as the architect of a strong economy has crumbled, not altogether his fault, but we know whom to blame when he and his colourless alter-ego, Chancellor Alistair Darling, shilly-shally over tax changes that do no good to anyone and positively damage some of the poorest, and a lot of the hardest workers in lower paid jobs.

A by-election ‘shock’ like Crewe and Nantwich should not be seen as extraordinary in the history of by-elections in the mid-term of any government, but this one, whatever the possibility of Labour pulling back its traditional vote in a general election, does look like part of a process. The long-lived Labour government might expect to have had its moment in the sun at this stage, the fickle public to be looking for a change, any change, but one cannot help feeling that Tony Blair might yet have pulled a rabbit out of the hat. The Conservatives will not yet bring out the champagne over their vote-winning policies, the public are still hazy on details; so much for the government’s capacity for unpopularity and ability to dig itself into a hole. Nevertheless the Conservatives have won a spectacular victory for the time being, with a 17.6 per cent swing in their favour, their first by-election victory in 30 years and, by the way, the collapse of the Liberal Democrat vote.

Gwynneth Dunwoody, the respected former Crewe and Nantwich MP, was a popular local member, whose daughter, Tamsin, hoped to inherit her seat. Dunwoody, lauded by her party since her death in April, was in fact a permanent thorn in the side of the party leadership, which lost no opportunity to stop her in her tracks, sacking her as chair of the transport select committee and being forced to reinstate her after a parliamentary and public outcry from those who saw her as the people’s champion against the worst of New Labour’s heedless target-focused policies. The expedient beatification of her mother, and Tamsin Dunwoody’s potential to follow in her footsteps, cut little ice in the face of government unpopularity and an inept campaign orchestrated by the government hierarchy that included shamefully obvious moves to reduce the impact of the abolition of the 10p income tax band with immediate measures that could be reversed at the next budget. Dunwoody herself must have seen the writing on the wall for her campaign when it descended into attempts to renew the sort of inter-party class war that leaves a contemporary and relatively meritocratic public cold.

Attempts to portray Edward Timpson, the new Conservative MP for Crewe and Nantwich, as a ‘toff’ in the same mould as the Old-Etonian leader, David Cameron, and the shadow chancellor, George Osborne, were proved irrelevant, and it is to be hoped that Labour’s public relations team will realize their mistake before the next general election. Gloriously, I think that we — the great British, class-ridden, public — have finally become sophisticated enough to look at substance more than style although votes on issues of fertility and abortion in the last week still leave room for improved Conservative substance on issues affecting women in particular.

Gordon Brown has never cut a sympathetic figure but, as the carapace of strength and power cracks, he becomes increasingly pitiable, the worst possible state of affairs for a leader in any field. Falling back on Old Labour strategies is grasping at straws, and it is hard to spot a forward path that has any credibility with party or public. Meanwhile, former colleagues and theoretical friends demean themselves and diminish their leader still further with a rash of memoirs of which Cherie Blair’s is, by far, the most undignified, making her look like a sort of Sex and the City airhead — a little woman supporting, or she would rather we believed, leading her husband from behind closed doors and providing altogether too much information about her character, her family and her gynaecology.

It is depressing that a highly successful, independent and intelligent woman should fall into the Hello! society hole. I first met Cherie Booth when she was socially uncertain and intellectually sure. That image underwent instant transformation with the help of the image makers and shakers on her arrival in Downing Street and now the position seems entirely reversed as her considerable brainpower and apparent common sense have been subsumed by a delight in spurious celebrity and its trappings.

In her book, Cherie has accused Gordon Brown of “rattling the keys” above Tony Blair’s head and hounding him out of office, making plain her personal dislike of her husband’s former Chancellor. Meghnad Desai’s view that “Gordon Brown was put on this earth to prove how brilliant Tony Blair was” is a view embellished by other memoirs from Alistair Cameron, John Prescott and Michael Levy, the faintly scaly former chief Labour fundraiser at the centre of the “cash for honours” scandal, who unaccountably reminds me of John Hurt playing Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant. But that would be another story altogether — it must be the flaring nostrils and bouffant hair, since he wholly lacks the gay, seductive whimsy.

Prescott, who suggests long-term support for Brown whilst tarnishing him as sulky and difficult, has a go at Tony Blair to even things out. Levy trumpets Blair’s purported conviction that Brown has none of David Cameron’s easy ability to communicate, with Middle England in particular, and cannot beat him in a general election. Since the prime minister seems to be fresh out of miracles, dismal prophecies on his future are beginning to look like certain bets.