Though reassured to hear no one was hurt, Mr Brown might have reflected that this has been a week of car crash politics, albeit chiefly in a less literal sense. First, he forgot he was wearing a television microphone and committed the unimaginable gaffe of referring to Gillian Duffy, a Labour voter whom he had greeted warmly, as “a bigoted woman”.
Then his bravura comeback in the televised debate on the economy failed to procure the boost he might have hoped for. Despite a consensus that this was Mr Brown’s most impressive showing, most snap polls taken after the broadcast put him in third place.
It is a testament to Mr Brown’s resilience that he appeared repentant over his snub to Mrs Duffy but otherwise unbattered by the week’s travails. In his closing statement in the debates, he had appeared to imply that New Labour’s 13-year tenure was finally at an end.
As he told viewers: “I know that if things stay as they are, perhaps in eight days’ time, David Cameron, perhaps supported by Nick Clegg, would be in office.” Surely that was a concession of impending defeat, we ask him on a train to Derby?
“No it wasn’t a concession of possible defeat,” he replies. “It was a reminder that that was where the opinion polls were yesterday.” So he’s not throwing in the towel? “Never, never. I’m fighting this to the last second of this election. I’m a fighter. I’ve had to fight for everything I’ve got. I’ve never done anything but fight. I’m not fighting for myself. I’m fighting for the future of Britain.”
Though he looks slightly weary, there is nothing downcast in his demeanour. Squashed into a second class carriage, he is ultra-polite to a group of voters who greet him warmly. Maybe more surprisingly, he seems good-humoured, relaxed and confident, against many auguries, that the real campaign starts here. As he puts it: “The novelty of the debates – the personality and the style and whose tie is better – is over.”
But the public, we say, may have already made its mind up, with Labour trailing a consistent third in the polls. Is he saying that he would never do a deal with the Lib Dems? “I’m fighting for a majority Labour government. There are so many undecided people, who have not taken to the message of the Conservatives or the Liberals. There’s everything to play for. I’m fighting every inch of the way to the last single second. And I’m going to be fighting with arguments.”
Mr Brown is never short of either arguments or statistics. Despite what must have been an exhausting trial by television, he was up early to amass more ammunition. He greets us armed with a crumpled cribsheet on which he has scrawled newly assembled facts and figures on youth unemployment and potential savings in his signature black marker pen.
But like it or not, we say, this election is also about personalities, and his character has been judged wanting in the case of Mrs Duffy. “I’m a very harsh critic of myself,” he says. What did they talk about for so long behind her closed front door? “We talked about her life and her views on a whole range of things. I made my apology. I did it as quickly as I could. I went to see her to rectify it as fast as possible. I said, in a comment my father would have been more likely to make, that I am a penitent sinner.
“Sometimes you say things you greatly regret. And I have paid a very high price for it.” Does he think his remark about Mrs Duffy may have cost him and Labour this election? “I said that I paid a heavy price. I’m not saying that it has ramifications. But I have personally paid this heavy price for a mistake that I made.”
On immigration, one of the issues on which Mrs Duffy tackled him, does he concede Labour was too lax about admitting people coming to Britain from outside the European Union? “A balance has to be struck,” he says. “The principle is clear – use the Australian points system.”
If Mr Brown is slow to admit past errors, he is in no doubt about how hard it will be for him to dispel the shadow of Labour’s long incumbency. More passionately than in the television debates, he asks us also to judge him on his successes. “If you guys look back two years, I was there, on my own with only one or two people, taking a big decision on the banks. Just like I had to make big decisions about the euro and the independence of the Bank of England.
“No one was ready to move with us at the time, and I knew that the banks would collapse unless we did something. It’s the big calls that matter in politics, and I just feel the Conservatives are not ready for this. They’ve got the big calls wrong, and the Liberals won’t be in a position where people will trust them either. It’s been very difficult, but I am the person to make these big calls.
“There will be a jobs catastrophe under the Conservatives. No doubt about it. Unemployment will rise substantially. Think of 50,000 young people without a guarantee of further education out on the streets. And inheritance tax cuts would be immoral. How do people see it as fair if the biggest beneficiaries of the Tory manifesto are a few millionaires like Lord Ashcroft?”
So why, we ask, is Labour’s message so clearly failing to reach the voters? Does he accept it’s his fault? “I take all the responsibility for what happens,” he says. “Over the next few days, we have to get this message across.” Although he claims to welcome the televised debates as a new tool of democracy, he doesn’t sound an unmitigated fan of a format in which his awkwardness has been magnified and his qualities have failed to shine.
“With all this personality stuff, the message gets squeezed out,” he grumbles. “People don’t want to elect a TV personality. They want to elect a government. The issues will come back to people’s health care and education and jobs.”
Mindful, perhaps, of the criticism levelled by the Institute of Fiscal Studies, which accused all three leaders of failing to spell out the cuts in prospect, Mr Brown is keen to lay claim to frugal tendencies. “We are creating jobs but also making welfare savings. Nobody should underestimate the extent to which we are prepared to take the tough decisions.”
But the toughest decisions facing him may yet be personal. Though he will not countenance defeat, he must surely accept that the time will come for him to hand his much-contested mantle on to someone else. Does he think about it? “When I cease to make a difference, then I will cease to want to be involved in politics.” Will he know when that moment comes? “I will know,” he says.
He’s seen plenty of David Cameron and Nick Clegg in action. Which young Turks in his own party does he most admire, we ask. David Miliband? Ed Balls? Naturally, he won’t be drawn. “I’m not talking about it, and you would never expect me to.”
The prize he longs for will turn out to be a poisoned chalice for whoever grasps it, according to Mervyn King. In the view of the Governor of the Bank of England, the winning party will soon become so reviled for the cuts it must impose that it will be removed from power for a generation. “The Governor has his own view,” says Mr Brown.
“I believe we can deal with this deficit reduction and we can take the country with us.” But what, specifically, does he have to offer? He comes as close as he has ever done to ruling out a rise in VAT; a policy he claims the Tories will have to implement. “Our deficit reduction plans don’t require us to raise VAT.” So can he guarantee that he won’t do it? “Look at our record. It’s not in our plan.” The other concrete move is that he expects international agreement on a bank tax to be concluded imminently, pointing to the G20 meeting in June.
But that decision may come too late for Labour. Does he accept that a centre-Left coalition would be better than a Cameron government? “I couldn’t go along with cutting child tax credits,” he says, before listing a string of other unacceptable “Liberal policies”.
“There’s the euro, VAT on new homes, the amnesty [on long-stay illegal migrants]. Quite a lot of new material became available to the public [in the final TV debate.]” And so Gordon Brown fights on, his differences with the other parties seemingly irreconcilable and his optimism undimmed.
Barring miracles, Labour may be heading for the worst defeat of any governing party in a generation. Mr Brown’s critics may see him as doomed, deluded, tilting at windmills as the election moves beyond his grasp. But his conviction remains as staunch as ever, and his faith undimmed.
“I’ve always responded to a fight. One thing that people will say about me is that when things go wrong, then I come back. This is going to be me fighting to the last minute and the last second of this campaign. The debates are over. Now it’s decision time.”
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