LONDON: If a week is a long time in politics, a year can seem an eternity. Last July, Gordon Brown basked in public and media approval. After waiting so long, and after so much bitterness between him and Tony Blair, he had finally succeeded to the premiership in triumph, or so it seemed.

And all has now turned to ashes in his mouth. It was said of Stanley Baldwin by his biographer that, in a matter of months in 1936, “from the highest place in public esteem and confidence he had sunk to very nearly the lowest”, and those words fit Brown. His government is in disarray, his poll ratings head towards absolute zero, Labour lost a safe seat at one parliamentary byelection, came fifth behind the British National Party at another, and is bracing itself for a yet more humiliating defeat in a third in Glasgow East.How did this shattering reversal of events come about? Some of those who were sure a year ago that he had exactly the personal qualities for the job are now just as sure of the opposite, but there is an alternative explanation. As Blair himself patronisingly said on the radio the other day, Brown was the victim of events beyond his control. Maybe that is truer than our last prime minister realises, not least because he is the real culprit.

There is an old historical debate between “Cleopatra’s nose” and the longue duree. Is history made by incidental human factors and actions – Pascal’s saying that “if Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed” or is it determined by deeper currents which individual endeavour is powerless to retard or impel, as the great French historian Fernand Braudel insisted with his “long period” of change, beside which everyday political events were mere “dust”?

The answer is of course both. Sometimes one individual really can alter the course of history: it’s ironic that this view was anathematised by Marxist-materialist ideologues in Russia and China, since it was all too obvious that Lenin, Stalin and Mao played huge and decisive personal roles, alas. But then sometimes there are great political sea changes, or shifts of the tectonic plates, to which individual actors are irrelevant, and this may be especially true in modern democracies.

At the 1906 election in the UK, and again in 1945, the Tories as the Conservatives are often called were swept away. No one attributed this to the personal magnetism of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman or Major Attlee, who were though both very able men little more than extras in the great drama. Even when another sea change took place in 1979, the British people had not warmed to Margaret Thatcher they admired her and thought that she was the right woman for the moment. And there was subsequently a good deal of myth-mongering about the unique personal contribution of Blair in returning Labour to power.

All this helps to explain the astonishing collapse we have witnessed. Anyone can now say that Brown was oversold a year ago, sometimes by politicians and pundits who have since changed their tune, but the euphoria was widespread, or at least so polls suggested. There must be another answer and it’s provided by another comparison, not with those earlier elections but with the events of 1990-92.

By the end of the 1980s, admiration for Thatcher had worn thin and then worn out. Her historic reforms had been carried through by the time she won her third election in 1987, but she was as energetic and destructive as ever. Her obsession with Europe had driven her slightly mad, and she showed a pig-headed determination worthy of a better cause when she tried to push the poll tax through against wiser advice.

As a result, by the summer of 1990 her government and party were in very low waters, as polls and byelections showed. Then when the Tories ruthlessly discarded her in November they enjoyed a sharp recovery, leaping up in the ratings. This was just enough to tide their improbable new leader John Major over until the election in April 1992.

And yet it was illusory. The public were really yearning for the Tories to go after so long, but somehow shied away from following through their own logic. Maybe a personal factor applied in the form of “Neil’s nose”. Malcolm Rifkind unkindly says he still believes that the Tories would have lost that election if Labour had been less ineffectually led and, although Neil Kinnock deserves more credit than he has usually received for previously rescuing Labour from destruction, that could be true.

Just how much of an illusion the April 1992 victory had been became clear only months later. Black Wednesday, when the pound was forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, at huge cost, sharply reminded the electorate what, deep down, they thought. The Tories suffered a collapse in public support from which they had barely recovered three elections later.

In other words, what Major and his party had enjoyed after the defenestration of Thatcher in November 1990 wasn’t a genuine recovery, or the proverbial honeymoon period. It was what, in a brutal phrase, the stock exchange calls dead-cat bounce: when a plunging share price stages a brief resurgence, which proves no more real or permanent.

That was also what happened a year ago. The seeming surge in the government’s popularity was less a tribute to Brown than sheer relief that Blair had gone at last. It was also a sign that he had achieved his electoral victories by way of morally eviscerating the Labour party, emptying politics of its content, and anaesthetising the country. With all that euphoria, Labour forgot the underlying fragility of its position. Even in 1997 Blair gained fewer popular votes than Major had in 1992; in 2001 voting turnout collapsed; by 2005 four million fewer people were voting Labour than eight years earlier; and Blair “won” that final election with a pitiful 35 per cent of the vote, or one-fifth of the electorate as a whole.

To be sure, the past year has demonstrated Brown’s own real shortcomings, although these were visible enough before; his faint-heartedness, his indecision and his tendency to make bad situations worse. If the price of oil and the credit crunch are indeed beyond a prime minister’s control, toying with calling a general election and abolishing the lowest rate of income tax will remain textbook examples of political unforced errors. But even so, what they really did was to remind people of what they had long since come to dislike and despise about New Labour.

An already strong temptation to ditch Brown may become stronger still after Glasgow East, but Labour MPs should consider the possibility that such a drastic course will make them look abject and panic-stricken, and do no good at all. Does a dead cat bounce twice?—Dawn/ The Guardian News Service