LONDON — With his Labor Party having gone down in a crushing defeat in local and European elections, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown clung to political survival by his fingernails Monday amid more defections from his government and calls from within his party for him to step down.
An almost palpable sense of gloom and desperation enshrouded Brown's official residence at 10 Downing Street as he and his advisors absorbed disastrous ballot results that showed Labor losing in Wales for the first time in nearly a century, an avowedly racist party winning a seat in the European Parliament, and the opposition Conservatives turning more of Britain's electoral map blue, their traditional color.
Brown, 58, is now politically at his weakest since inheriting the premiership from the charismatic Tony Blair two years ago. Besides his increasing unpopularity with the public, reflected in polls, confidence in Brown is draining fast within the ruling Labor Party, of which he remains head.
On Monday, Brown managed to fight off a brewing mutiny among backbench Labor members of Parliament to dump him as party leader and, in effect, prime minister. With no clear alternative candidate for the rebels to rally around, he was able to persuade Labor lawmakers at a meeting Monday evening to give him and his reshuffled Cabinet a chance to make things work.
But in an indication of the depth of Brown's troubles, one Labor member of Parliament issued an extraordinary open letter explaining to her constituents why she could no longer support her own party leader. Lawmaker Sally Keeble accused Brown of laying out no vision for Britons to embrace and of mismanaging the government.
"Time has really run out," Keeble wrote. "By the next general election, the Labor Party needs to put forward a coherent vision with a credible team."
Although Brown has been behind in polls for months, his authority and standing have fallen so far and so fast within the last few weeks that even some veteran commentators have been taken by surprise.
Continued bad economic news, a shocking government defeat in Parliament over the right of Gurkha soldiers from Nepal who fought in the British army to settle in Britain and, above all, an ongoing scandal over the expense accounts of lawmakers who sought reimbursement for the cost of, among other things, moat-clearing and gardening manure combined to clobber Brown in the eyes of both the public and his fellow Laborites.
