The New Gordon Brown.(World Affairs; EUROPE)

Byline: Stryker McGuire; With Christopher Werth in London

After Months Of Missteps, The Prime Minister Is Revamping His Image--Again.

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again: it's a strategy that works better in sports than in politics. But it's just about the only line of attack left for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. For a decade he toiled at the right hand of Tony Blair, waiting not always patiently for his turn at the top. After Blair stepped down last summer, Brown enjoyed a few good months. Then it all went wrong. In the New Year he's resolved to turn his fortunes around and, not for the first time, reinvent himself in the eyes of the British electorate. Over the Christmas holidays, Brown and his advisers settled on a back-to-basics plan as the best means to relaunch the prime minister and his government agenda.

With economic turbulence expected, the strategy would be to build on the strengths that served Brown so well when he was chancellor of the Exchequer: seriousness, competence, a return to "prudence," the watchword of those days when he ruled over the big Whitehall bureaucracies as the "Iron Chancellor." It would also be back to basics in the sense that Brown would return to the task of improving public services like health and education. But with the Conservative leader David Cameron--the Tories' answer to 1997-vintage Blair--now well ahead in the polls, Brown has work to do. "It's a big ask," says Andrew Rawnsley, the Observer columnist and Labour Party historian, "but I wouldn't write him off."

It's odd that after a quarter century in Parliament, 10 years as chancellor and seven months as prime minister, Brown, 56, should still be seeking to define himself. Intellectually formidable and politically accomplished, Brown remains largely unknowable, not just to British voters but even to many people who work down the hall from him. Even Brown's admirers compare his political style to a "steamroller." Blair once praised the "heavyweight" Brown for wielding his political skills like a "big clunking fist." As is often said of people who come across as cold or uncomfortable in public, Brown's friends say he is charming and at ease in private. But his public reputation stands like a wall between the "real" Brown and the public to whom he so desperately wants to appeal. This difficulty in bonding has led to serial attempts by Brown and his handlers to refashion his image. The first, in early 2006, aimed at humanizing a man known mostly as the country's uber-accountant. But gimmicks like a photo spread of Gordon en famille by the fireplace attracted more mockery than warmth. It seemed contrived, and it was. As the Tory M.P. David Ruffley said at the time, "You can't put in the x factor that God left out."

So when he took over from Blair in June 2007, Brown attempted remake No. 2, promoting himself as the anti-Blair by concentrating on substance over spin. It seemed destined to succeed: the country, increasingly tired of wars abroad and not enough public-services progress at home, was palpably eager to see Blair go. And at first, the country embraced Brown. But ultimately the electorate recognized that this refashioning was a Blair-like exercise in spin--especially when Brown, seduced by his rising poll numbers, toyed seriously with calling a snap election, nixed the idea when in-depth polling showed he would suffer and then claimed his decision had ...