For a politician so damagingly associated with the discredited former Prime Minister Tony Blair, Gordon Brown enjoyed a remarkable honeymoon period as Britain’s new leader. At a time of great national and international unease, he impressed a sufficient number of people that he is a true statesman, an altogether more substantial figure than his theatrical predecessor. Some may even have believed him when he signaled his determination to distance himself from the culture of “spin”, the mania for managing the news, which was the hallmark of Blair and his New Labour politics.

Yet the truth is that Brown so much shares Blair’s addiction to spin that even when he proclaims his commitment to transparency, it turns out that he is simply practicing a new form of spinning. And now his manipulativeness has backfired in the most embarrassing fashion. By allowing speculation that he was about to hold a “snap” autumn election and then belatedly announcing, as the opinion poll gap between the Labour and Conservative parties narrowed, that there would be no election after all, Brown has done what may prove lasting harm to his credibility. A leader who was being praised for his sureness of touch has left himself looking cynical, vacillating and inept.

Brown made the crass mistake of turning up in Iraq, in the middle of last week’s Conservative Party annual conference, to promise that 1,000 soldiers would be coming home by Christmas. This was to upstage the Conservative leader, David Cameron, as he prepared to address his party on the eve of a possible general election and to imply that it is he, the leader of the Labour Party, not Cameron, who is the true patriot. Yet Brown’s low cunning proved self-defeating. In effect, he had thrown down the gauntlet to the Conservatives, gifting Cameron the opportunity to put on a display of conference-pleasing machismo and demand that the prime minister prove his mettle by calling an election without delay. For Brown to back away from doing so after all this was bound to be interpreted as a failure of nerve.

Breaking the gentlemen’s agreement that during a party conference other parties refrain from party politicking, Brown’s Basra visit demolished his claim to be committed to plain dealing. And by speaking in less than candid terms, he handed a sizable propaganda advantage to his opponents. For in fact, as the Conservatives were not slow to point out, some of the homewards-bound troops referred to by Brown have already returned home and others have already been redeployed. Meanwhile, Britain will, it seems, be retaining a troop presence of some 4,500 at Basra airport until the end of 2008. Writing in the Guardian, Jonathan Steele pointed out that it is unclear whether Brown himself fails to acknowledge the futility of keeping British troops in Iraq or whether he is keeping them there purely to placate US President George W. Bush. Early and late, Brown has fought shy of clarifying his position about the British deployment in Iraq and the broader question of Britain’s controversial relationship with the United States.

What his rash visit to Iraq has achieved is to undermine the stifling cross-party consensus that has hitherto prevailed over Iraq. Incensed by his conduct, John Major, a former Conservative prime minister demanded that Brown make plain the government’s policy, while the shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, was emboldened to declare that the British-backed coalition had lost the high moral ground in Iraq and that the occupation can now be seen to have been an unequivocal failure. It remains to be seen how strenuously the Conservatives are going to challenge the Brown government over Iraq. At any rate, thanks to his well-received speech at the Conservative Party conference, and to Brown’s own crashing ineptitude, Cameron has now regained the political initiative that he seemed to have forfeited in recent months.

Speaking on the basis of a few handwritten notes, the media-savvy Cameron projected himself as far more progressive figure than the overbearing, faintly menacing Brown. Declining to exploit anti-immigrant feeling, he ridiculed Brown’s slogan “British jobs for British people” as nothing but a piece of populist rhetoric that would in any case fall foul of European Union legislation. It showed, he said, Brown’s contempt for the intelligence of British people. Moreover, his message that Britain is a “broken society”, with much needing to be done to repair family and community structures, may have resonated rather more with voters of all persuasions than Brown’s bullish pronouncements about Britain’s economic success.

On foreign policy, the Tory leader declared that it was not possible to drop a “fully formed democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000 feet”, a statement which might suggest that a Cameron government would steer clear of the disastrous foreign entanglements which have marked the era of Brown and Blair.

However, it is not clear if his foreign policy would be significantly different from that of the current British government, and certainly he pledged to sustain the British military presence in Afghanistan. Cameron also failed to indicate whether as prime minister he would endorse a US strike against Iran. It is well to remember that the Tory leader numbers among his lieutenants Zionists whose pre-eminent concern is the security of Israel; it may be, too, that he is every bit as in awe of American power as Blair and Brown. It hardly boded well that among those who addressed the Tory conference was the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger (who made his contribution via satellite link, having evidently concluded that Cameron looks like a loser and is not therefore worthy of the full-fledged endorsement that would have been implied by the governor’s attending the conference in person.)

If Cameron has faltered in his efforts to give the Conservative Party a commanding opinion poll lead, it is largely because he is widely seen as a Tory version of Tony Blair. Cameron self-consciously modeled himself on the former Labour Party leader, unwisely styling himself the “heir to Blair”. It was a strategy that may have seemed eminently sound to an aspiring young Conservative politician who saw what rewards Blair had reaped by transforming the old Labour Party into a glitzy, business-friendly, US-style social democratic party.

And for a time, Cameron’s own modernizing efforts, his espousal of green issues and determined attempt to shed the Tory Party’s image as the “nasty party” composed of aging right-wing bigots, seemed to be paying dividends. The eco-conscious Cameron did not even seem to be hurt by the unfortunate revelation that the bicycle he rides to work in order to reduce his carbon footprint is followed by a gas-guzzling official car. However, with Blair out of office, it soon became apparent that the Blairite preoccupation with slick self-presentation was working against him and that the public preferred Brown’s unglamorous, business-like style.

It is unlikely that Cameron could have decisively defeated Brown had a general election been held in the near future. What the Conservatives could have done is greatly reduce the Labour majority in the House of Commons, thus undermining Brown’s authority and raising questions in the Labour Party about his long-term suitability as party leader. As it has turned out, Gordon Brown has undermined himself.