He must have wanted to be Harold Macmillan, after Anthony Eden, after Suez. He looks at the moment more like Jim Callaghan after Harold Wilson before the winter of discontent. It is, of course, far too early to write the political obituary of Gordon Brown. His force of intellect and character, his political knowledge and cunning, and his public-service-driven sense of duty mean that he will hold on to power. Nor is he ‘in office and not in power’; his authority, though battered by the events that have taken place since last summer, remains intact – he is not John Major in 1996-7. So why is he currently more a Callaghan than a Macmillan?

In 1956 Britain and France, in collusion with Israel, attacked Egypt to retake the Suez canal which Colonel Nasser had nationalised. As chancellor, Macmillan had stood shoulder to shoulder with Eden as the Eisenhower administration pulled the plug on the last great Imperial adventure. It was Macmillan’s job to tell the prime minister that there was little money left and unless the operation stopped the US would bankrupt the British Empire. A hawk until that point, Macmillan then switched camps and effectively forced Eden out of office. He was sure that he could do a better job than Eden, who was becoming more and more unpredictable in his behaviour.

Macmillan was quite right in that judgement. The Conservatives went on to a landslide victory in the 1959 general election and might well have won in 1964 if Macmillan had not retired prematurely because of a cancer scare. His 1959 victory earned him the nick name Supermac. The analogies between Macmillan and the prime minister are clear and for a few months after Brown came into office it looked like history might be repeating itself. But, in Macmillan’s famous phrase, ‘events dear boy, events’, took over.

So if Brown is not to be the new Macmillan, then what about the new Callaghan? Lucky Jim was Wilson’s chosen successor when the latter resigned as prime minister, again because of a health scare. Callaghan seemed perfectly equipped for the highest office and he was a competent prime minister. He made, unfortunately, one crucial mistake – he did not hold an election in the winter of 1978 but hung on until May 1979. The period between saw the winter of discontent followed by Labour’s defeat and the Conservatives’ arrival in power for a generation. Last summer’s ‘election that wasn’t’ has strong echoes of Callaghan’s fateful decision.

There are other kinds of comparisons that can be made between Brown and political figures from the past. Two sets of long-term rivals suggest themselves: in the US, Adlai Stevenson and JFK and, in Britain, Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland. Only one of these actually made it to a top job but the contrast between them highlights what appear to be some of Brown’s current weaknesses. Stevenson was the great candidate and intellectual who could not find the last ‘four inches of steel to get to the top’. In fact, this expression was used by Jenkins to describe his friend and rival Crosland. Both Stevenson and Crosland were intellectuals in politics and both found it hard to make decisive decisions. Crosland was a popular minister during the Wilson years but he was not a particularly effective one. Jenkins was decisive but he too lacked the final steel to finish Wilson off and take the leadership when he might have done so in the late 1960s. Brown has equally made it to the top but does not seem to have risen to the ultimate political challenge in the way that many of us hoped.

Aside from events, there are two main reasons for Brown’s current faltering – the media narrative and the Blair factor. The media narrative was critical in finishing off the Callaghan government. Journalists like to hunt in packs and hate standing out. The media narrative in the winter of 1978-9 was that this was a broken country which needed to be fixed by a new government. Labour could do very little to change that narrative. The story now is that Brown is finished and everything that happens seems to reinforce that sense. Except that he is not finished and he is still very much in power, despite the 42 days rebellion. There will be no challenge to his position from inside the Labour party: the old left no longer exists. Moreover, while Brown might not be able to change the media narrative, that narrative might not matter if he can reignite the public’s belief that he is the best leader of this country in uncertain times. This is where the Blair factor comes in.

Macmillan changed the political conversation completely when he came into office. Even though he had been a key architecture of the Suez war, he appeared to be a new leader and he modernised electioneering in important ways. Tony Blair dominated political communication for so long, and gave such a dominant and successful performance, that the natural tendency must be for the new leaders to be the next Blair rather than their own person. Brown’s painful attempts at being folksy are testaments to this, as are Cameron’s crooning speeches which may work in the short term but also reinforce his unfounded reputation as a light weight. Rather than look to history for an analogy for Blair’s influence in political communication techniques, let’s look for a moment at The West Wing.

A number of times in the early seasons of The West Wing, President Bartlett’s team resolve to let Bartlett be Bartlett. This approach culminates as a plot line in the episodes covering his election to a second term. Toby, the head of communications, wakes up in the middle of the night worrying about the fact that Bartlett is too clever, too distant and smart – he has a Nobel Prize in economics after all. Toby realises that there is no way that that perception of his candidate can be shifted so there is no point in trying.

Rather than forcing Bartlett to try to be folksy, the team allow Bartlett to be smart, because smart is good. In the debates, Bartlett lets rip with eloquence and long sentences that express complex ideas – he wins a landslide. David Cameron was Norman Lamont’s brain for many years – he is absolutely not a light weight – but he moved too far down the Blair emoting road to pull back now. Brown, on the other hand, never looks at home on breakfast TV and is at his best when dealing with expert questioning and talking about complex policy issues.

History teaches us that these things are not that easy in the real world. But the current US election and Bill Clinton’s first campaign teach us that those who rewrite the rule book often win the game. A bold strategy would be for Brown to stop making Blair-style speeches about moral compasses but make more speeches about the complexity and difficulty of Britain’s position in the world and offering solutions: ‘I may not share your pain but I know a way of reducing it.’ The prime minister should challenge the other party leaders to televised debates with expert questioners on critical areas of policy. Indeed, Brown must do so in order to move away from being a Callaghan, who was trying to be a political magician like his predecessor Wilson, and towards being a Macmillan, who came onto the deck of the Titanic and, rather than rearranging the deck chairs, stopped the ship from sinking.