LONDON, Dec. 24 (UPI) -- This may be Gordon Brown's last Christmas in Downing Street, the home of Britain's prime ministers. If so, it will be more like suicide than murder, more the result of Brown's own deliberate electoral gamble than a party coup against him.
Brown, whose political future seemed doomed only three months ago, has been invigorated and his fortunes revived by the financial crisis, which he has handled with reassuring and impressive leadership.
The opinion poll lead of the Conservative opposition was 20 percentage points in September. It is now down to 5 points or less, so Brown is unlikely to be the victim of a political plot by members of his own party bent on survival.
How can this be? Britain looks to be suffering more than the United States from this financial storm. Its level of private debt was higher and its housing bubble had expanded to even more unreal proportions. The 12 percent of the British economy that came from the City of London's extraordinary prowess at financial services is falling by a third and maybe by a half.
North Sea oil, which sustained the economy and the British pound through Margaret Thatcher's rigorous reforms and through Tony Blair's (mostly) sunny years, is running out. And Brown's taxes on the oil producers are no great incentive for them to look for much more, with the price down below $40 a barrel.
Brown's old Labor Party instincts, which led him to double state spending on education and to almost double it on health (for only modest returns), have turned into financial embarrassment. Britain's level of public debt, which was a healthy 40 percent of GDP only two years ago, is heading up to French and American levels of 60 percent-plus.
But Brown looks well, is self-confident in Parliament and on TV, and appears ebullient and energized in private. Finance is his strong point, and his fellow leaders in the G7 economies openly respect his views and his boldness. His decision to offer $1 trillion in guarantees for the British banks in those dark October days when the global financial system was on the verge of collapse inspired his European and American counterparts to follow suit. On the day he was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics, Paul Krugman declared that Brown had "saved the world."
So the rumor is starting to spread that Brown may call an election on April 23, St. George's Day, named after England's patron saint. Such an election would follow hard on the heels of what Brown expects to be his triumph, the next meeting of the G20 group of world leaders in London on April 2.
It may be new U.S. President Barack Obama's first appearance on the world stage after his inauguration, and the summit is meant to be the moment when the world's top economies decide on their collective action to prevent this global recession from turning into a new worldwide depression. The Chinese and Russians, the Japanese and Europeans, the Indians and Brazilians will all be there to embody Brown's repeated call that the global economy is now too big, far-flung and interdependent to be left to the old G7 nations of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan and the United States.
If the summit succeeds, and it is a big "if," in agreeing a globally coordinated stimulus package and a new free-trade agreement with mutual banking guarantees, it could be the perfect platform for Brown to launch his re-election bid for a fourth successive term in office for Labor. That would be an unprecedented feat.
But Brown is a cautious man, and April might be too soon, with the unemployment lines lengthening in Britain, more and more companies going bankrupt and the opposition sneering that Brown is more focused on meeting world leaders than on fixing Britain's deep problems.
So the next date penciled into his diary is June 4, which is also the day of the elections for the European Parliament. This holds peril as well as opportunity for Brown. The peril is that Europe is so unpopular with a large core of British voters that they all turn out and sweep the Labor government away. The opportunity is that the Conservative opposition will lose votes to the anti-European parties, like the quixotic United Kingdom Independence Party and the far-right British National Party.
But the European elections will proceed anyway, whether Brown combines them with a general election or not (and the non-partisan Electoral Commission may rule against a double election on the same day). And if he ducks it, as he ducked the chance of holding an election last October, the opposition sneers of cowardice will redouble. That would make it all the tougher to call and win an election in October.
Brown has to hold an election by May 2010. That is the deadline, but under Britain's antiquated rules the government can call one at any time up to that moment. So Brown may, if his customary caution holds, hang on grimly until May of the year after next in the hope that the economy will be in recovery by then.
This is a most uncertain prospect. Even if the world is coming out of recession by then, British voters may not feel much better off, and Brown could lose. At least by then he'd have been prime minister for almost three years, a respectable term. But if Brown steels himself for the gamble of April, he could enjoy five years of power sweetened by economic recovery. The temptation glitters, but his dour old Scottish caution is likely to make him falter.
