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 St. as he and his advisers absorbed disastrous poll results that showed the Labor Party 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 politically at his weakest since inheriting the premiership from the charismatic Tony Blair two years ago. Besides his increasing unpopularity with the general public, reflected in opinion polls, confidence in Brown is draining fast within the ruling Labor Party, of which he remains the titular head.
On Monday, Brown managed to fight off a brewing mutiny among back-bench Labor members of Parliament to dump him as party leader and, in effect, as 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 no longer could support her own party leader.
Lawmaker Sally Keeble accused Brown of laying out no vision for Britons to embrace and of mismanaging his 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.”
