Word: labouring
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...burning question for Brown is what Manchester thinks of him. Brown will take power at a time when the country has tired of the hugely successful New Labour project he helped create. He faces a resurgent Conservative Party, led by David Cameron, now remaking the Tories in his own, personable image and aiming to capture support in traditional Labour heartlands like Manchester. At the beginning of May, as Labour marked a decade in office, voters turfed out scores of the party's representatives at polls in English municipalities and for the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly. The Tories...
...secure a fourth term for Labour - and a first elected term for himself - Brown must quickly woo back disenchanted voters by confronting a range of painful problems. Public discontent centers on Britain's role in Iraq and the government's perceived subservience to the U.S., as well as questions of probity raised by Labour's spin and an investigation into party fund raising. Brown won't officially start as Prime Minister until after the conclusion of a seven-week leadership contest. It should be a formality, given the absence of credible opponents, but champagne corks aren't yet popping...
...boils down to a question of character, and that character is complex. As partygoers at Labour's Manchester congress discovered, Brown doesn't do small talk. In interviews, too, he repudiates seductive sound bites in favor of considered responses that can leave eyelids drooping as the 10th subclause gives way to an 11th. Presentation is important, he concedes in an interview with Time, but he wishfully senses a new appetite for substance: "The issues and the challenges are greater and more global than they were 10 years ago. I think the electorate expects people in public life to address these...
...Here's what his friends say. "He's a driven force," according to Geoffrey Robinson, M.P. and former Paymaster General. "You get a feeling there's a bit of his brain that's always on the job," says Morris. The worry among Labour backbenchers, hunched over pints and pork scratchings in the bars of Westminster, are those questionable soft skills. Brown must learn to be, well, less like himself, they say. And the role model they've chosen for him? Blair...
...drinks at their local pub. Some of his supporters pray he won't try, perceiving in his rough-diamond personality a much-needed antidote to the mounting public cynicism that has blighted Blair's final years. Morris, for one, hopes for an era of "politics done differently. If Labour has had a failure since 1997, it's that we've let that trust and openness with the public go." Brown himself suggests an end to the culture of endless policy announcements and targets that defined and eventually undermined confidence in Blair's government. "You cannot just pull levers and expect...