UK:DOWNING STREET was again forced to dismiss questions about Gordon Brown's leadership yesterday as the prime minister struggled to maintain Labour's policy focus ahead of next week's Crewe and Nantwich byelection.
As part of his fightback after Labour's disastrous performance in the local and London elections, Mr Brown was pledging fundamental reform to social care for the elderly in England following health secretary Alan Johnson's admission that the system is facing a £6 billion funding gap over the next 20 years.
Mr Brown will hope to steady Labour nerves and show himself a leader for the long term with tomorrow's preview of the next queen's speech outlining his government's legislative programme up to the next general election.
But questions about who would lead Labour into that election were sharply revived yesterday after backbench MP Frank Field told the BBC World Service he would be "very surprised" to find Mr Brown still in charge by that point.
As damaging revelations and allegations from the Cherie Blair, John Prescott and Lord Levy book serialisations vied for damaging headline attention, Mr Field also warned that Mr Brown could yet face a second, and possibly fatal, backbench revolt over the abolition of the starter 10p tax rate. Unless Mr Brown was able to produce "a satisfactory deal" reassuring MPs about compensating all low-paid workers affected by the tax change, Mr Field suggested there were enough backbenchers prepared to "block the budget" and thus make the prime minister's position "intolerable".
In a wounding intervention in the leadership debate, however, Mr Field went beyond his declared policy disagreement with the prime minister to suggest that Mr Brown was "unhappy with himself" and in the position he had long coveted. "The awful fact that's coming across is that he's so unhappy in himself," said Mr Field, describing it as a "tragedy" that "somebody whose real aim in life is to be prime minister, now has the task and seems so lacking in enjoyment in trying to carry it out". Mr Brown's closest ally, Ed Balls, suggested that Mr Field is a loner acting dishonourably.
Alongside a new survey showing a devastating collapse in his public standing, Mr Brown's authority and reputation suffered further blows at the weekend as Mr Prescott and Mrs Blair published their accounts of the Blair/Brown years.
Mr Prescott described Mr Brown as "frustrating, annoying, bewildering and prickly", capable on occasion of going off "like a volcano" and often of sulking so often during meetings that they would have to be abandoned. Mrs Blair, meanwhile, said her husband would have stood down before the 2005 general election had Mr Brown been prepared to implement Mr Blair's public service reforms instead of "rattling the keys" to Number 10 above his head.
Foreign secretary David Miliband loyally maintained he did not "recognise" Mr Prescott's portrayal of Mr Brown. And yesterday Mr Johnson likewise challenged Mr Field's description of Mr Brown's capacity for "tempers of an indescribable nature".
Expressing frustration at the "knives coming out" in a settling of scores, Mr Johnson insisted he had never once been shouted at or had the experience described by Mr Field, and asserted his respect for Mr Brown "as a really, really good, decent, able politician".
As Mr Johnson called on people to "set all this true confessions stuff to one side", Conservative leader David Cameron said the government was "beginning to resemble a sort of bizarre soap opera, where they seem more concerned with settling scores with each other than actually running the country".
This was why people were "increasingly looking to the Conservative Party", said Mr Cameron, and "why I'm so determined that we're really going to win over their trust".