Brown’s package offers no insulation against desperate backbenchers

The first Labour MP the Mole bumped into after Gordon Brown launched his long-awaited £910m fuel poverty package today said he supported the plans as far as they went, but added: "Is that it?"

The package set out by the Prime Minister at his monthly press conference was worthy but modest, lacking the sort of initiatives that will turn around catastrophic poll ratings. He promised cavity wall and loft insulation for pensioners and for the worst-off families, and a 50 per cent cut in the cost of insulation for everyone else.

He also pledged that 600,000 poorer households would have lower social tariffs by the New Year and that cold weather payments - triggered if temperatures fall below zero for seven days running - would go up from £16.50 to £25 a week.

But where was the windfall tax on energy firms' excessive profits as demanded by more than 100 backbenchers? Where were the vouchers to help families afford this winter's gas and electricity bills?

The Government machine allowed speculation over both ideas to run unchecked during a febrile August, stoking up expectations among Labour MPs desperate for some good news to pass on to mutinous constituents. So when Brown outlined the package - characterised by former Minister Frank Field as a "mouse of a proposal" - there was an inevitable sense of anti-climax.

I wrote last week that the PM's Labour critics fear he has the "reverse Midas touch" following the bungled handling of the temporary suspension of stamp duty. We now have more evidence of the theory.

And this isn't Brown's only slip this week. You wouldn't have thought an apparently innocuous article for the parliamentary magazine Monitor could cause problems for him. (The article may or may not have been written by the PM himself, but it carried his byline so he must take responsibility.) However, ministers were aghast that it threatened to create a transatlantic diplomatic incident after the PM appeared to offer support for Barack Obama over John McCain, thus breaking the convention that you don't mess in other countries' electoral politics. The row blew up just as McCain moved into an opinion lead over his Democrat rival for the first time.

Insiders report that the bunker-like atmosphere at No 10 hasn't improved since Brown's return from holiday. One said yesterday: "You don't want to be in the same room as him when he loses it."

THE MOLE: FUEL BILL MEASURES

LAST UPDATED 3:47 PM, SEPTEMBER 11, 2008