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Sir, it is Prime Minister on the line

Until last week nobody had heard of Wajid Rafique. And, really, there was no reason why anyone should have heard of a 30-year-old ordinary resident of a small Lancashire town.

But suddenly his name is all over the media and he has become an unlikely poster-boy for Prime Minister Gordon Brown at a time when even his so-called “core” allies are loathe to testifying for him.

It all started when the magazine PR Week, the bible of Britain’s PR industry, disclosed that Mr. Brown routinely phoned members of the public who wrote to him and discussed their concerns with him. The line, sought to be spun, was that contrary to his image of an “aloof” leader out of touch with his voters he had, actually, his ears very much to the ground.

The magazine suggested that the idea of “cold-calling” voters was the brainchild of Stephen Carter, a former PR high-flier, whom Mr. Brown recently hired as his strategy chief to improve his dour image. It was all part of Mr. Carter’s efforts to make Mr. Brown appear more people-friendly — or to “humanise” him in the eyes of voters, as the magazine put it.

The claim, initially greeted with scepticism (“What, grumpy Gordon Brown actually saying hello to people?”), might have remained in the realm of official “spin” had Mr. Rafique not turned up at the BBC to confirm it. He said he had written a letter to Mr. Brown some months ago protesting the continued presence of British troops in Iraq but never received a reply. But then one morning while he was still in bed after a late night the phone rang and a woman said she was calling from Downing Street and the Prime Minister wanted to speak to him!

“The woman said she was going to connect me to the prime minister. A few seconds passed and the prime minister came on the phone,” Mr. Rafique said sounding as though he had won the lottery.

He was impressed that Mr. Brown talked him through the letter and then “apologised on behalf of the Labour government for what had happened to the people of Iraq.”

“The prime minister said he fully understood how I felt, and said he would give his full concentration on the withdrawal of British troops.”

The call lasted four minutes with Mr. Brown concluding by saying: “How nice it was speaking to me.”

Mr. Rafique is not a Labour voter but after that “magic” call he seems to be rooting for Mr. Brown, if not the party.

“I believed what he said and felt like he was on my side,” he said.

Downing Street denied suggestions that it was all part of a drive to give Mr. Brown a “make-over” insisting that he had always tried to keep in touch with voters.

“The PM takes a great interest in correspondence that comes in. He likes to keep in touch with voters who take the trouble to contact him,” a spokesman said.

One Brown loyalist, the Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson said that even as Chancellor Mr. Brown regularly called up voters and chatted with them.

“The fact that Gordon does like to ring members of the public has been one of the best-kept secrets for the last decade. As far as I know he started doing this when he was Chancellor in 1997,” he told one newspaper.

But the disclosure about Mr Brown’s voter-friendliness has done little to stop the slide in his popularity which, according to a new poll (and that, too, in the pro-Labour Observer newspaper), has fallen to an all-time low with 75 per cent of voters saying that he is doing a “bad job.” The number of those who believe he is doing a “very bad job” is as high as 46 per cent.

Mr. Brown took over as Labour leader last June after waiting for the top job for ten years and, ironically, on the first anniversary of his premiership the party is facing its worst ratings since the “dark” eighties when it was driven into political oblivion under Michael Foot’s leadership. Indeed, according to the Observer survey Labour has replaced the Tories to become the “new nasty party” — seen by most voters as “more divided, backward-looking, untrustworthy and sleazy than the Conservatives.”

Worse, even Rupert Murdoch, the weathervane of British politics, has turned his back on Labour Party. In an interview to an Israeli newspaper he is reported to have pointed to “lack of leadership” in Britain; and, to make sure that everyone understood what he meant, he added: “You didn’t have lack of leadership with Tony Blair.”

Mr. Murdoch is known to put his money on the winning horse. Back in 1997, he put it on Tony Blair’s New Labour, and now it looks like the turn of David Cameron’s “compassionate” Conservatives.

Meanwhile, a controversy is raging over the alleged timings of Mr. Brown’s cold calls with officials denying claims that he is in the habit of calling up voters at the crack of dawn — which is when he gets up. The PR Week quoted a Labour source as saying that once the prime minister called up someone at 6 a.m.

“Luckily the person he called was a shift worker, so he was awake,” he said prompting critics to allege that even with the best of intentions Mr. Brown cannot get things right.

“I can’t imagine anything worse than waking up to the sound of Gordon Brown bellowing statistics in your ear,” said Francis Maude, a senior Tory leader.

But he will say that, won’t he?

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