John Rapley

LONDON:

Gordon Brown may be the only man in England who felt happy at last week's shock defeat of the English football team. It meant that for a couple of days, at least, a nation wasn't going to blame its glum mood on him.

Few foresaw England's defeat at the hands of Croatia. That's why it seemed inevitable. I have learnt that one of the few certainties in life, in addition to death and taxes, is that the England team will underperform. Any time its players get confident of victory, they produce the sort of passionless football that leads to national embarrassment. England thus finds itself out of a major international tournament for the first time since its exclusion from the 1994 World Cup.

For the English, it's almost as painful as seeing the Italians win the World Cup. The headlines are still trumpeting the shame of it all, and journalists are falling over their pens trying to find new epithets to pin on the disgraced England manager. It's provided a bit of relief from the unremitting bad news that seems to be coming from the country's politics.

Just a few months ago, the governing Labour Party appeared to be cruising comfortably in the polls. Having successfully pushed Tony Blair into a slightly earlier retirement than Mr. Blair might have chosen for himself, Gordon Brown assumed the mantle of government and was looking to call early elections.

Long shadow

How distant a memory those days must now seem. The convention season that was supposed to be the springboard to a Labour re-election, instead saw the opposition Conservatives bounce in the polls. The near-collapse of a British building society, which saw the first run on a British bank in over a century, cast a long shadow over the government's economic management. Gordon Brown's reputation at the Exchequer did not carry over into the prime minister's residence.

Last week saw yet more bad news. The revelation that two CDs containing the personal details of half the country's population had gone missing from a government office has sent shockwaves through the country. Privacy advocates are constantly reminding us that we live in an age of identity theft and Big Brother spying.

Shivers

The spectre of such information working its way into the underground economy causes lots of shivers. And while some pointed out that most of the information on the CDs can be found on websites like Facebook, nobody expected government bungling to be making things worse.

Opinion polls reveal a mood of discontent. It is not that the Tories are surging. If they seem to have put their worst days behind them, there is yet to emerge any evidence that the Conservatives are enjoying a sustained rise in popularity. It is rather that Labour under Gordon Brown appears to have lost its footing.

There's no cause for alarm in the government's ranks yet. It has a couple of years before it has to call an election, so there is plenty of time to repair its image. And it's not at all obvious that the Conservatives might not yet break out in the sort of open fighting or nasty politics that has hampered them in the past.

Nevertheless, it is a much less auspicious start to the Brown premiership, and a much less easy ride, than he must have been hoping for last spring when he moved into 10 Downing Street.

If the England defeat took some of the harsh spotlight off of him, he will not be able to benefit from the happy bounce an England victory in next year's Euro championship might have brought his government.