Were you frustrated that there was an attempt — from within your own party — to dump you on the eve of Britain emerging from the recession?

“I’m a fighter. And you get up in the morning and you get on with what you’ve got to do. And every day, there’s a new problem you’ve got to deal with and you’ve got to be resilient. You’ve got to keep moving forward and not be put off by criticism. You’ve got to listen to criticism, but not be put off by it.”

— Gordon Brown, interview, The Guardian, February 6.

Do you vote?

“On the whole, no. And this time I probably won’t be voting for Labour. But I couldn’t say who I will vote for. There’s something about David Cameron that bothers me — those features of his are still waiting to turn into a face.

— interview with Clive James, The New Statesman, February 4 2010.

You’ve got to keep moving forward and not be put off by criticism. You’ve got to listen to criticism, but not be put off by it … yeah, he doesn’t sound rattled at all. The Guardian‘s big-splash interview with the Broon had the air of Beau Geste propping up dead legionnaires on the battlements to fool the encircling natives.

If there was ever any doubt that Brown had never been suited to the pseudo-presidential style of British politics today, the turgid, recitative in Labour’s upmarket house paper (The Daily Mirror goes into bat at the red-top end — if they’d done it, the entire exchange would have been redacted to six lines, which would be five more than if it were in The Sun) proves it.

Patched together out of motivational phrases interspersed with technocratic social policy, the piece nevertheless managed to lay down the line that Labour will be using against the Tories, a late-blooming realisation that they we are shocked shocked to find that the conservative party is upper class.

For a decade, the New Labour leadership has striven to keep class out of the national conversation — for the simple reason that it always saw the real enemy as Old Labour.

Though that was straightforward for Blair, who has never been a part of anything (like most constitutionally isolated political types, he has now joined the RC church), Brown was from that world, and his celebration of the power of the market had always been fuelled by a sense of liberation from the Left of the ’70s and ’80s.

Brown had been editor of The Red Paper on Scotland, a battered copy of which I found in the second-hand section of Bookmarks, London’s still-impressive socialist workers party bookshop, situated pretty much smack dab in the middle of the route Karl Marx trudged from his family’s Soho hovel to the British Museum library in the 1850s.

In a way it seemed quite reasonable to find the Red Book amid the ancient Progress Press volumes of Plekhanov and the Webbs. Designed as a way of joining the left across the labour/non-labour divide, the Red Book series featured Labour figures, Communists and left radicals together, and Brown’s introduction, though agonised — he manages to make even the socialist liberation of a country sound dull — is a conscientious effort to figure out what a workable, genuine socialism could be.

The impetus that the ALP had surrendered decades earlier was still alive in UK labour into the ’90s, and British politics can’t really be understood without understanding that.

In the ’80s, Brown had been one of the first of the centre-left-left (Labour divisions are or were as complex as the class divisions that can have someone meaningfully describing themselves as “middle-upper-middle class”) to switch to the idea that the core of the economy should be capitalist, its redistributive mechanisms social-democratic.

With the joyous energy of the convert, he identified himself with the undoubted dynamism that the Thatcher revolution had created in banking, finance, media and everything else except well, making stuff. The glee with which he associated himself with bankers was, as so often in life, more about winning an argument with a half-dozen old Trots than with the wider political arena.

The visible and major collapse that occurred in the UK economy — worse than elsewhere, because it had placed banking at its core — thus not only tarnished Brown publicly, it blew a hole in his guts from which he has not yet recovered, and will not. Furthermore by 2008, Brown was far from robust in the first place.

His personal isolation and suspiciousness — he is now having to deal with accusations (from Blair loyalists) that he assaulted staff members in sheer rage — were already well-known. And the death of his first child at a few days old appears to have permanently shut off some part of him that led back to the world.

Given all that, and with a pre-election appearance before the Chilcot inquiry pending, it is thus a wonder that the poll gap between Brown and Cameron has closed to about 10 points — at 40 for the Tories, and 30/22/8 for Labour, the Lib-Dems and the minor parties. By any other measure, a 10-point gap would guarantee extinction, but as it’s come in from 22 points at its height, the gap is being seen as leapable, Evel Knievel-style.

Those who are sticking with him — and it’s a measure of Labour’s utter disarray that they had a leadership coup and nobody turned up — are relying on one thing and one thing alone: that in tough times, what was the nouveauish appeal of Dave Cameron and his turquoise Tories has now become a threat, a bunch of bright-eyed kids willing to say anything to get a rise.

Brown’s corrupt, defeated Labour party, and its flabby, beaten leader becomes someone that people cleave to because that’s how Britain feels. Brown is a personification of the national mood, and the Tories — even the old nickname doesn’t feel right for them anymore — don’t offer a sense that they could lift the country out of it.

This is a theme to which we will return in the coming months — or weeks, if Brown calls an early election in the next fortnight. For 30 years, since the election of Margaret Thatcher, the UK has been at the forefront of a transition out of the old left/right divisions that has characterised modernity since the French revolution.

Thatcher put individualism and the market at the heart of a Conservative party — and thus created a cultural revolution that Labour had been unable to perform.

New Labour shifted the role of the state from transforming the structure of society, to reshaping its populace — psychologically, culturally — to fit Britain as a neo-imperial, hyper-capitalist power. New labour’s role was, in other word, the conservative dimension of a generation-long social transformation.

After three successive defeats, without gaining more than a couple of points in their overall vote, the Tories then surrendered to an insurgent group — Cameron’s push, a mirror of the Blair-Brown inner circle in Labour in the mid-’90s — who have made one of the more audacious reconstructions of a political party in some time. By drawing in a green dimension — a focus on the “countryside” and “green England” — Cameron connected the most pressing concerns of the voters he needed to get, with the claim that the Conservatives had always been the party of “one nation”.

With Labour having failed to reverse the staggering levels of inequality that the Tories instituted, and the perception that the UK is beset by hideous crimes, largely against children (even though a recent study shows a steady decline in such deaths since 1974), Cameron’s new conservatives have been able to take over Labour’s franchise on social betterment — with the tagline that Britain is “broken”.

The Tories thus advance the idea that they are the party of practical, unideological reforms (they are keen on the manipulative, profoundly anti-human “nudge” theories beloved of Lindsay Tanner), while Labour is obsessed with giganticism, a Promethean commitment to untrammelled growth.

In other words, the left-green-social liberal alliance borne of the 1960s new left is over, as is the classical liberal-social conservative alliance sustained by the Cold War. Decisively. Politics, in an era of new forms of class and class relations, is being substantially recombined.

With the exception of the US, which is sui generis, every Western polity is heading towards this point. Britain got there first, for various reasons —  chief among them the radical left was politically weaker than anywhere in Europe, but intellectually strong, and thus free — in institutions and thinktanks like Demos and LM/Spiked — to fundamentally rethink the categories of politics in a way that flowed back into the major parties.

This election is important not merely because it is one in which the first-past-the-post system may be finally thrown over, but because it is the first in which genuinely postmodern political parties — based not around a solid class or ideological formation, but around different ensembles of political values, plugged together in any number of ways — confront each other.

In so being, a greater focus than ever falls on the party leader, and it is there that Cameron — who has proved a first-class political reconstructor, of the sort the Liberal party could do with — comes under suspicion from the mass of voters.

The party put a focus on him early, in a desperate attempt to pretend they weren’t anything associated with Thatcher or Major. Now he is a victim of over-scrutiny, ably captured by Clive James above, thankfully distracted from poetry writing by the irresistible lure of getting to talk about himself.

Yes, David Cameron, the larval form of a real person — that’s the guy. The image refers to a transcendentally weird billboard the Tories put up,  which features on the left, Cameron’s face in terrifying scale, and airbrushed into a smooth brownness, looking like a beached manatee. “We Can’t Go On Like This” the slogan reads, playing out through a vast expanse of whiteness (which graffitists have used to good effect, “F-ck Off Back To Eton, Tory Twat” being the pithiest of the amendments).

It looks like one of those ads that  the film director Tony Kaye puts in Variety, where other people would send a text message (“I’ve read the script Trevor. Give me a call”).

The first time you see it, it’s just weird — as if Cameron is breaking up with his wife very, very publicly. Indeed, the style is a measure of the political-cultural transformation in the UK, because it is unashamedly Britart in influence — somewhere between Gilbert&George and Gavin Turk. The former were famous for doing enormous prints of four turds emerging from a-seholes to make a Christian cross (and were keen Thatcherites) so maybe that’s where the idea came from.

Twenty years ago, the whole style would have been seen as inherently left — edgy, weird, designy — and now there is simply no relationship between form and content, class and party, base and superstructure, whatever you like.

It’s one of the reasons why no one really knows what will happen in this election, despite the expansive Tory numbers.

And also why Brown, trying to project an image of solidity is also trying to grab a bit of the “new politics” stuff, with a commitment to holding a referendum on voting system reform — his choice for the alternative offer being our system of single-seat preferential (or AV, as it’s called here) — the single worst system for entrenching major parties around.

He’s also heading to Brussels to provide some “leadership” on the imminent collapse of Greece — to which benighted demesne your correspondent will be heading, to see if they can’t screw up the whole EU project altogether.

Brown is, in other words, tap-dancing like an old hoofer, desperate to find anything that works. After all, you’ve got to keep moving, listen to criticism, not be put off by it, especially when you’re up against the man putting a new unformed area of flesh on Tory politics.