Can Gordon Brown do a Hillary?

What Gordon Brown needs, after three months of hellish press and bad polls, is a Hillary Clinton-style comeback. What are the chances?

Well, at least Tory leader David Cameron has helped by making a hash of his attempt at bandwagoneering. On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, on BBC Five Live, he declared his admiration for the then-White House race leader. "I think he's a brilliant speaker, I think his optimism and sense of hope for the future is inspiring a lot of people. It's great to see. Too often politics gets down to hope and fear and I think it's wonderful when hope wins."

That will have been a morale-booster at Labour headquarters - but Brown needs to translate one-upmanship into a return to authority and popularity in the opinion polls.

On that score, the latest polls offer a crumb of comfort. The new Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has done exactly what Labour hoped a new leader would do and taken

voters away from the Tories. The Lib Dem rating, which at one point in the autumn was barely in double digits, has jumped to 19 per cent. That has had the effect of narrowing the Tory-Labour gap from a 10-point-plus spread to 37-33. Thanks to the vagaries of the electoral system, if there were an election tomorrow that would at least make Labour the biggest party in a hung Parliament.

With these new figures, it would take only a modest recovery for Labour to retake the lead in the polls. The best hope for a Brown comeback will come in May after London's Mayoral election, if Ken Livingstone can see off Boris Johnson's Tory challenge.

If and when that happens - and assuming Clinton can maintain her surge - Brown's new strategy chief Stephen Carter will be able to ratchet up the similarities: Brown is our Clinton to Cameron's Obama; everybody - in the UK, no less than the US - wants change, but Brown and Clinton have the experience to make it happen; Obama and Cameron are good with words but fail to deliver.