I'm not at all sure that there's a rational justification for Brown hanging on, but the psychological one is that being PM is something he's wanted for so long and he's going to hang on to the bitter end.
The one consolation is that he's probably making Labour unelectable, so we can look forward to some interesting upheavals when we do eventually get the chance to vote.
What is his justification for hanging on?
As Leo Amery famously quoted Cromwell to Neville Chamberlain in 1940 in the famous debate that made Churchill our wartime leader ----- "You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, GO!"
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TELEGRAPH 30.1.09
Gordon Brown is a busted flush - and he's taking us down with him Tony Blair timed his exit from No 10 perfectly - Machiavelli would have approved, says Jeff Randall.
Jeff Randall
You have to hand it to Tony Blair. As the foundations subside beneath the New Labour project, rocked by a crumbling economy, the timing of his exit is looking more and more like a chronometric masterpiece.
Throughout his occupancy of Number 10, Mr Blair held what the City calls a "put option" on Gordon Brown. This meant that he alone would decide when to hand over the keys to a frustrated chancellor.
As any experienced trader will tell you, calling the very top of a market is almost impossible. Those who manage to do so are either satanically gifted or divinely lucky. I'll let you decide which applies to Mr Blair.
Either way, his departure from Downing Street on June 27, 2007 could not have been more finely tuned had it been left to a Swiss horologist. Having wrung every drop of glory from the Bubble Years, he slipped away just as the debt-fuelled boom was about to go spectacularly bust.
June 28 is the only date in the calendar when both the month and day are perfect numbers. For Mr Brown, however, it signalled the moment when the clock began ticking on some explosive imperfections.
Within weeks of his moving next door, Northern Rock blew up, presaging an avalanche of bank failures and economic turmoil. While Mr Blair is collecting a fortune on the black-tie dinner circuit in America, his old ally is being buried by bad news at home.
When a leader's preferred courtiers are Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, he invites comparison to Machiavelli. In the case of Mr Blair, it is deliciously appropriate.
Machiavelli's best-known work, The Prince (written in 1513), is still the handbook of choice for political schemers. In it, there are lines that might have been scripted by Mr Blair solely for Mr Brown: "A prince makes himself odious by rapacity, that is, by taking away from his subjects their property."
Or, as Mr Blair said at the 1997 Labour Party conference, where members celebrated a return to power after 18 years: "This country, any country today, will not just carry on paying out more in taxes and getting less." Allelulia brothers! Hear the truth.
Unfortunately, the other half of the double act wasn't listening. This, in part, helps explain why Mr Brown's administration is 11 points behind in today's YouGov opinion poll. I don't believe the country is hugely enthusiastic about David Cameron's Conservatives. They are simply the default position for voters who are nauseated by Labour's incompetence.
With Britain about to be lashed by the worst recession for 60 years, the coping classes have had enough. The penny is dropping, even in some Labour strongholds, that for all his crude social engineering, stealth taxes and raids on pensions (with the likelihood of yet more punishment to come in the Budget), the Prime Minister has over- promised and under-delivered. Improvements to the health service reflect only a fraction of the extra billions that have been poured in. Value for money exists as a concept in ministers' briefing notes, but nowhere else.
Education standards are going down. The gap between private schools and state comprehensives is widening. Last week, I dined with half a dozen teachers and professors from one of the country's best universities, all of whom insisted that A-levels had been debased.
Worse still, our Armed Forces are expected to police the world's hell holes on a budget (£33 billion) that is just one fifth of what we hand out for "social protection" (£169 billion). The military is showered in warm words, but suffers from a freeze on real (inflation- adjusted) spending. Of all Labour's wicked deceits, this is the one I find most offensive.
According to the International Monetary Fund, the house that Brown built is more rickety than any other among advanced nations. Britain's economy is forecast to shrink by 2.8 per cent this year, compared with 1.5 per cent in the US, 2 per cent in the eurozone and
2.5 per cent in Japan.
Yes, we are the worst placed among industrialised countries to cope with upheaval. In terms of bald numbers, it will be more painful than either the Thatcher recession of the early 1980s or the Major debacle of the early 1990s.
This will come as a shock to many voters, though not, I suspect, to a majority of Daily Telegraph readers. It may surprise, too, some of the Prime Minister's colleagues who, in Rent-A-Crowd style, used to cheer his vainglorious chicanery, especially on Budget day.
Mr Brown's final performance as Second Lord of the Treasury, in March
2007, was a classic of its kind. The opening section was nothing less than a paean of praise to his own genius, a tribute to a decade of micromanagement by a chancellor whose idea of improved productivity was to crank up the output of self-congratulation without asking for a bonus.
Unencumbered by humility or wit, Mr Brown boomed: "We will never return to the old boom and bust." He had, of course, said it before. But this time, I suspect, he really believed that he had cracked it. He genuinely thought that he had found a way to halt the waves of free-market activity.
He went on to explain how (thanks to him) we were doing much better than Johnny Foreigner and to predict that Britain's economy would grow between 2.5 per cent and 3 per cent in 2009, all of which would be underpinned by "monetary discipline" and "fiscal discipline". Oh dear. It was nearly two years ago, I grant you, but it feels like something from an ill-judged comedy sketch.
Getting Mr Brown face-to-face with reality is no easy task, but the Institute of Fiscal Studies did its best this week with a damning analysis of the country's prospects. At the rate we are going, Britain faces a £20 billion-a-year "double whammy" of tax rises and spending cuts to restore order to public finances. It could take until 2029 for government debt to recede to "normal" levels.
Nobody is saying that the world has not turned sour. The International Labour Organisation fears that global unemployment could rise by 50 million. But this Government's flawed stewardship has exacerbated Britain's problems. Mr Brown continues to bet the bank, but without a mandate beyond the fawning of paid advisers and encouragement of close relatives.
Machiavelli's assessment of the dangers for those who inherit power is a warning for Mr Brown. It will be "a double shame to a hereditary prince, if, through want of prudence and ability, he loses his state". One wonders what Teflon Tony thinks of that.
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'Jeff Randall Live', a news programme focusing on business and politics, is broadcast on Sky News at 7.30pm, Monday-Thursday
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