Word: labouring
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Critics of Gordon Brown - and amid sliding approval ratings and mutterings from the ranks of his own Labour Party, there are more than a few - complain that Britain's Prime Minister lacks vision. They say he's a details man - not a bad attribute in a Finance Minister, the role he occupied for just over a decade, but a weakness in a national leader whose job it is to discern and articulate the bigger picture. Yet from the Scottish home Brown has owned for more than 20 years, a solid family house with large bay windows and a sloping front...
...never perfected: the ability to communicate and persuade. In his defense, he can claim bad luck: he followed into office Tony Blair, at his best one of the most pitch-perfect masters of the black arts of political persuasion ever seen. But after a rocky few months, some Labour Party activists, worried about their prospects at the next election (which doesn't have to be held until 2010), openly wonder whether Brown's long time in Blair's shadow has truly prepared him for the top job. Seen through that prism, his U.S. trip and other such international fixtures...
...himself to take advantage of that change. "A lot depends on the mood after the Inauguration, as to whether the new U.S. Administration will want to be connecting to the multilateralist argument, in which case Brown will be in the right place," says Sunder Katwala, general secretary of the Labour-affiliated think tank the Fabian Society...
...personal connections," says Katwala - and Britons became disenchanted with their then leader precisely because of this closeness and the sulfurous taint of the Anglo-American alliance on Iraq. Katwala maintains that Brown's businesslike approach to foreign leaders is in tune with the times. Denis MacShane, a former Labour Foreign Office Minister, echoes the point: "Brown wants respectful state-to-state relations with tricky countries like Russia and China, but he's not getting into that schmoozy clinking of beer glasses in the best Tony...
...done him little good at home. He is battling splits within his party and is braced for an electoral mauling in civic and mayoral elections on May 1. A poll for the Sunday Times newspaper, published on April 13, put support for the Conservative opposition at 44% to Labour's 28% and showed that Brown's personal ratings have plummeted...