Pity when all that's left is sorrow

Even Gordon Brown's enemies feel sorry for the British Prime Minister. Photo / AP

It's now got this bad for Gordon Brown: his enemies are feeling sorry for him. For the first time since he arrived in Number 10 Downing Street, he is the object of pity.

Since his premiership started to unravel, a process of attrition that began when he flunked having an early election in the autumn of 2007, he has been portrayed with ascending levels of vituperation as dithering, cowardly, mendacious, useless, unstable and generally unfit to be British Prime Minister.

He has generated anger, ridicule, loathing, spite and despair.

There was a flavour of the blood sport - the spectacle of the once proud bull being speared and slashed to death - about some of the media coverage of his premiership. He had brought a lot of this on himself, but that did not make it terribly pleasant to watch.

In the past few days, we have witnessed a wholly novel phenomenon: the Prime Minister receiving near universal sympathy.

The paradoxical prompt for this change in the script was the Sun newspaper.

The tabloid ruined the night of his speech to the Labour conference by choosing that moment to announce that it was switching its allegiances back to the Opposition Tories.

I can't say I have a great deal of general sympathy for the Prime Minister about being burnt by the Sun. He and his predecessor truckled to the right-wing tabloid when it was on their side. Neither he nor Tony Blair complained when the Sun scorched Tory leaders. Labour rubbed its hands with glee when it portrayed the then Tory leader William Hague as a dead parrot.

But there is widespread agreement, across the political spectrum, that Brown has been the victim of a nasty campaign in respect of his badly written letter of condolence to Jacqui Janes, whose 20-year-old son died of the horrific injuries he sustained in Afghanistan.

It is entirely understandable that the grieving mother was made incandescent by a letter that looked to her like "a hastily scrawled insult" to both her and the service and sacrifice of her son. Number 10 Downing Street should never have sent out a letter of condolence to a recently bereaved mother with her name misspelt and the name of her son apparently corrected with a scribble.

This is not evidence that Brown is a bad man; it is evidence that Number 10 cannot aspire to even the most primitive levels of competence. It is not good enough to excuse it on the grounds that the Prime Minister's eyesight is poor, he works all hours and his handwriting is notoriously messy.