Election turnaround raises questions about Brown

LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Gordon Brown's decision to rule out an early general election after weeks of agonising has revived doubts about the character and decisiveness of the new prime minister.

The brooding Brown is famous for his mighty intellect but has been paralysed by caution at key moments in his career.

The trait surfaced again in the last few weeks when his aides let it be known he was considering a snap general election, just three months after finally taking over from Tony Blair.

The country was gripped by election fever -- but then a Conservative surge in the polls persuaded Brown to drop the idea.

Opponents accused him of losing his nerve and putting political gamesmanship before running the country.

Conservative finance spokesman George Osborne said Brown was "incredibly factional" and calculating.

"He is obsessed with the minutiae of the political game," Osborne told the BBC. "He might have got away with that as chancellor ... but actually as prime minister you cannot behave like that."

The episode appears to have done severe damage to the formidable reputation of Brown, who Blair once referred to as a "big clunking fist", by making him appear weak and vacillating.

Political commentators said Brown, who for the first 100 days of his premiership could do no wrong, had scored a spectacular own goal, giving a huge boost to Conservative leader David Cameron, whose popularity had been sliding.

"I think he will now be known, as he has been privately for a very long time, as a man who finds it very, very difficult to make up his mind on the really tough decisions, especially when they come out of the blue," Trevor Kavanagh, associate editor of the Sun, told BBC radio on Monday.

Newspaper commentators depicted Brown as being like Shakespeare's Hamlet, agonising over the election decision.

Brown, who published a book this year called "Courage" on eight world figures he admires, said he could have won an election but Britain "deserves to see from us our vision of the future". His allies said the turnaround would soon be forgotten.

Brown has sought to distance himself from the public relations "spin" of Blair, but critics said he used similar tactics by visiting British forces in Iraq last week, stealing publicity from the Conservatives' annual conference.

Strathclyde University politics professor John Curtice said it was reasonable for Brown to consider all the evidence but he should not have let the speculation run out of control.

"The real mistake was not stopping it three weeks ago and allowing it to reach the pitch that it did..," he told Reuters.

Julia Langdon, a biographer of Brown, wrote in The Mail on Sunday that Brown had an "excessively calculating character".

"It is because he considers the outcome of everything that he has so often bottled out over the years," she wrote.

Doubts about Brown's character surfaced as far back as 1998 when a political columnist quoted a Blair ally as calling Brown "psychologically flawed".

During skirmishing last year over who would succeed Blair, former Home Secretary Charles Clarke called him a "control freak". "He's not a risk-taker and that matters -- you've got to be a risk-taker in politics. The courage question is a big thing for Gordon," Clarke told a newspaper last September.

A former top Treasury official earlier this year described Brown's behaviour as Stalinist.

Langdon said Brown's biggest mistake had been his failure to stand against the late John Smith in the 1992 Labour Party leadership election, setting back "his own chances of fulfilling his lifetime ambition for almost a generation."

After Smith's death, Brown again decided not to challenge Blair for the Labour Party leadership in 1994.

Labour Party folklore holds that Brown agreed to stand aside and allow Blair to become leader on condition Blair would one day step down and let Brown become prime minister.

Brown believed Blair failed to keep his side of the bargain, but despite growing tensions between the two men, Brown never publicly attempted to force Blair from the leadership.

"The accusation that he lacks 'bottle' -- that Mr Brown was willing to wound, but afraid to strike -- dogged him throughout the Blair years," political columnist Andrew Rawnsley wrote in The Observer on Sunday.