Out of the frying pan and into D.C.

It is perhaps a measure of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s desire to connect with the American people during his visit to the U.S. this week that he seeded the ground with a recent appearance on a special charity edition of “American Idol.”

The usually gruff prime minister smiled for all he was worth during his brief taped message and announced that Britain would buy 20 million new mosquito nets to help end malaria in Africa. “All year on ‘Idol,’ it’s the talent of the American people we admire. But tonight, it’s your generosity,” he said. “Thank you, and God bless you all.”

If the gesture stirs up some goodwill ahead of Brown’s three-day trip to New York and Washington, it will be a welcome antidote for the prime minister. He has aroused unease in Washington over Britain’s unfolding disengagement in Iraq, while at home he has been navigating political depths most politicians explore only in their nightmares.

Though fairly popular last summer and fall after easing out Prime Minister Tony Blair, Brown over the last few months has managed to execute a near-perfect political swan dive.

Caught up in the U.S.-initiated sub-prime mortgage crisis, closures of post offices, unpopular legislation to detain terrorism suspects for up to 42 days without charge and the phasing out of a 10% tax bracket for low-income citizens, Brown has come close to setting records for how quickly a prime minister can fall out of favor.

A YouGov poll last week for the Sunday Times found that Brown’s personal rating had plunged farther and faster than that of any British leader since political polling of positive and negative perceptions began in the 1930s. He has fallen from plus 48 after he took office nine months ago to minus 37.

“The collapse is the most dramatic of any modern-day prime minister, worse even than Neville Chamberlain, who in 1940 dropped from plus 21 to minus 27 after Hitler’s invasion of Norway,” the Times reported.

Perhaps even more biting for Brown, who made his reputation as Britain’s skillful treasury chief under Blair, a Financial Times poll this week found that 68% of Britons were “not confident at all” in the prime minister’s ability to steer the country through the global financial crisis.

“A lot of us were very, very supportive of Gordon assuming the leadership, and he started out extremely well. But he has slightly disappointed us since,” said Des Turner, one of a growing number of Labor Party lawmakers who are worried Brown’s performance could leave the party at risk of losing the next elections, after 11 years in power.

“The electoral problems are serious,” said Philip Cowley, professor of politics at the University of Nottingham. “They’re not yet catastrophic, but they are headed that way.”

Brown had a triumphant summer, deftly managing the response to a terrorist attack in Glasgow, Scotland, three days after taking office and going on to shepherd the country through devastating floods and an outbreak of cattle disease.

But the famously intellectual and introspective leader failed to move decisively to capitalize on the party’s popularity and call a snap general election in the fall, as many had advised him to do. Then the long, dismal slide began.

One of the country’s biggest mortgage lenders, Northern Rock, fell victim to the credit crunch that resulted from the U.S. sub-prime mortgage crisis and had to be nationalized to protect billions of dollars in bailout loans already made to the bank by the government.

British banks are expected to lose more than $40 billion in the global financial turmoil, making Britain proportionally one of the hardest-hit countries in the world, the International Monetary Fund warned last week. Meanwhile, housing prices fell 2.5% in March, mortgage lender Halifax reported, the largest monthly drop since 1992, sparking fears of a housing crisis.

It is no wonder, perhaps, that some of Brown’s first meetings in the U.S. today will be with Wall Street leaders, echoing similar meetings he held with British bankers in London on Tuesday. Later in the week he will sit down with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke.

Brown has said he means to stay on a politically difficult course of keeping both interest rates and inflation low. “I think we now are taking the actions that are necessary, we are looking at further measures to help people in this difficult situation,” he told Sky News before his departure.

Brown is expected to meet with President Bush on Thursday, as well as the Republican and Democratic candidates for president.

U.S. officials are expected to press Britain for continued engagement in southern Iraq, though Brown is engineering a phased withdrawal.

“For the Americans, Brown is probably the least-liked British leader since Edward Heath,” Nile Gardiner, a director at the conservative Washington-based Heritage Foundation, wrote in the Sunday Times.

He said Washington increasingly sees Brown as “a halfhearted and unreliable partner” who is “lacking the stomach” for confronting Islamic terrorism.

Brown’s political problems, at least those at home, are in some ways problems of perception, said Rodney Barker, head of the department of government at the London School of Economics.

“When he was chancellor and he became prime minister, people thought, Gordon Brown -- yes, unspectacular but steady, reliable, trustworthy, workmanlike, down to earth,” he said. “But when you go off him, you look at exactly the same characteristics and you say: boring, unimaginative, uninspiring, lacking in charisma.”

Lately, Brown’s appeal seems to have sunk so low that even Blair, whose departure last year couldn’t come soon enough for many Britons, is being looked at with a bit of nostalgia.

A little ditty raced through Westminster last month, penned by a mysterious Parliament poet described by the Times of London writer who first published it as a Cabinet member: “At Downing Street upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t Blair; he wasn’t Blair again today; oh how I wish he’d go away.”

No one claimed authorship. But only a few denied it.

--

kim.murphy@latimes.com