Brown will get a bounce, but it won’t be enough to win the election

He may be basking in headlines praising his undoubted efforts in saving the world, but Gordon Brown knows he still has not saved his own neck. And that still looks like a far more difficult challenge for the Prime Minister.

Brown has been almost universally praised for his hard work and determination in making Thursday's G20 a success, even for ensuring the thing happened at all. As a result, he can expect a bounce in the opinion polls. But the realists in Westminster know it will not last.

As Alistair Darling confessed this morning, bringing the planet back from disaster is a process not an event. The measures taken at the G20, significant and even historic as they were, will take months and years to show real impact. Meanwhile the effect on the domestic economy will be near invisible - people still won't be able to get a mortgage, or afford it if they do get one, unemployment will continue rising to the symbolically grim three-million mark and businesses will continue to collapse.

The event that will have a direct impact at home is the Budget in just under three weeks time. That will do far more for the Government's standing in the opinion polls than anything agreed in Docklands. And it ain't going to be easy.

Mervyn King has - to steal David Cameron's phrase - taken the Chancellor's credit cards off him and snipped them into little bits. Darling has no room for another significant fiscal stimulus.

Meanwhile, the Chancellor has a pressing problem with savers, particularly the electorally important pensioners, who have seen their incomes plumet as a result of the fall in interest rates. He will also have to produce a new set of forecasts which are unlikely to show any great silver lining to this particular storm cloud. And this is all just for starters.

The Tories have undoubtedly taken the right tack here - offering qualified support for the G20 but swiftly trying to switch attention back to the domestic economy.

Cameron still has the problem of getting a clear message of his own across and remains vulnerable to the line that he would simply revert to Tory type and cut, cut, cut. And despite Cameron's recent comments, he is still stung by Brown's description of the Tories as the "do-nothing party".

But still the strongest card for the Opposition is the Government's performance at home and that will be thrown into sharp focus at the Budget and then again in the European and local elections in June - 12 months before Brown has to call a general election - and which everyone expects will be pretty disastrous for Labour.

So do not be surprised to see a new flurry of early election fever, with suggestions the Prime Minister might be tempted to go to the country around the same time as those local and Euro elections to capitalise on any post-G20 bounce. The flaws in the logic, however, are too deep for this to hold much water. Probably.

Any poll bounce is likely to have evaporated by then anyway, it could still look like a cut-and-run poll, and voters may not like the idea of electioneering in the middle of a recession. Also, the signal such a poll would broadcast would be that Brown believes things can only get worse. And, of course, political self-delusion being what it is, the PM undoubtedly believes that, given a final 12 months, he will be able to turn it all around.

Former Tory party chairman Lord Patten summed it up this morning when he praised Brown's success in getting a G20 deal, but added: "I don't think it will make much difference to the outcome of the next election, however."

So where next for Gordon Brown? One answer offers itself up as a result of his handling of the G20 and his subsequent description as 'Chancellor of the World'. Should he lose the next general election, might the IMF or the World Bank beckon?

THE MOLE - G20 AFTERMATH

FIRST POSTED APRIL 3, 2009