Brown must go because he is a poor Prime Minister and a handicap to the Labour party. He has lost his claim to economic genius. After the fiascos over the Gurkhas and MPs pay he has lost his claim to political genius. After the McBride affair he does not even look like a very nice person. The British people know that he was unwilling or unable to make his subordinates follow a proper standard of conduct. The depressing feature of the affair is that no one sent an email saying “we can’t do that – Gordon hates that kind of thing.” The only surprise was that McBride was proposing to put out stories against Tories rather than members of Gordon Brown’s own party.

Damian McBride was Gordon Brown’s creature, preserved in his job by Gordon Brown’s will, whose personality and methods were well known to Gordon Brown. The McBride affair was a stain on any Prime Minister, especially one who has spent the last fifteen years hawking his conscience around the British people. (If there is one good result, it may end Gordon Brown’s unctuous speeches about his “moral compass.”)

The Labour party was already paying a huge price for Gordon Brown’s hubris about the British economy. It was lucky to be faced with a vacuous and inconsistent opposition, but the Tories have taken a lead on the economy in the polls – and Gordon Brown’s record helps them to hold on to it. Too many bad things have happened to the economy generally – and to individual voters – which Gordon Brown promised to abolish. The end of boom-and-bust… the end of negative equity and home repossessions … no mass unemployment … security in retirement… a bright future for young people with training or higher education… all of these promises will be hung round Labour’s neck from now until election day. I predict confidently that Gordon Brown’s words and image will be used more by opposition candidates than by his own.

To be brutal, voters have no reason to believe Gordon Brown on the economy – even when he is right.

They now know that his years of apparent success were built on a bubble. The British economy rose on a balloon filled with hot debt. Gordon Brown was never in control of it, he simply clung to the balloon like Winnie-the-Pooh looking for honey bees in the clouds. The balloon was shot down and crashed to earth – and he asks us to blow up the balloon all over again.

He took all the credit for the economy when it seemed to be doing well but refuses to accept any responsibility for its virtual collapse. To many voters, this attitude seems not only arrogant but delusional.

Worse still, this attitude prevents him from offering any vision of a new future. If the economy miraculously recovers before the next election, Gordon Brown will see this as a personal vindication. He might even believe his propaganda as the saviour of the world economy. He will return us to the methods and assumptions he used as Chancellor – and we will repeat the present crisis a few years down the line.

Even if Gordon Brown had a new vision of the economy, voters know that they will have to spend years in dealing with the legacy of his old one. They know that they have to pay down huge debts, with higher taxation and reduced public spending. They know that the bank bail-out is not finished and that the government has committed an unlimited amount of their taxes and savings to buy toxic assets which no one else wants from banks which nobody loves. The same banks which Gordon Brown flattered and fondled for ten years.

Now on top of these massive electoral problems, Labour has to cope with a character issue. I am a veteran Labour supporter. I have worked for the Labour in every election since 1959. I have done my best to sell every Labour leader in that period (even Michael Foot in 1983). I don’t know how to sell Gordon Brown – and I don’t even want to try.  I cannot sell him as an economic wizard. I cannot (after McBride) sell him as a decent, honest guy doing his best. I cannot sell him as a warm, empathetic listener who knows what the British people are going through. I cannot sell him as a visionary with new ideas of how Britain will make its economic livelihood and become a better place to live.

I do not think it is fair on our party to carry him any longer. I would like an early leadership contest. There are now (I estimate) 150 Labour MPs who think they would make a better Prime Minister and party leader than Gordon Brown and perhaps one of them might capture the imagination of the British people and give Labour an outside chance of winning the next election.

So once again, all together now: BROWN MUST GO!