"I did not realise quite the scale of the challenge," Gordon Brown confessed in his heavily trailed environmental speech on Monday. But is the chancellor troubled by something closer to home than that rare confession of Brownite error? Has Labour's probable next leader also misread the politics of climate change too?
It is a vital question for Brown because it goes to the heart of the way he wants to appeal to the one in four Labour voters of 1997 and 2001 who have now turned their backs on the party he aims to inherit. Labour's charge against David Cameron on green issues used to be that he was playing photo-op politics. He's just posing for the photographers in front of the problem, Labour strategists would sneer. Brown's way of combating Cameron's approach would be straightforward and irresistible: to emphasise his own strategic and global approach against Cameron's emphasis on lifestyle, Labour substance over Tory style. The public would see the difference and go for Mr Granite, not Mr Gimmick.
If that strategy ever had any credibility, it lost some of it this weekend. Tory plans to put fuel duty or VAT on domestic flights (of which the chancellor, like all Scottish MPs, is a devoted customer) and to restrict air travel by the introduction of air miles allowances were a world away from posing with huskies. This wasn't bland or vague - it was tough. It would hurt. It would force consumers to think twice, to make choices. It wasn't feel good politics. It was feel bad politics.
Labour's response was striking. Cameron was simply headline-grabbing, charged the Brownite transport minister Douglas Alexander. If that was so, then Cameron had chosen a strange way of courting popularity. "Tories face fury over air travel taxes" said the Telegraph. Other papers joined the critical chorus. Between them, Labour and the air industry made sure that the Tory leader was seen more as a punisher of the people's pleasures rather than as a man with a plan to save the planet.
Today Cameron and Brown have gone head-to-head in an argument over green politics that will go a long way to shape the politics of the next 24 months. Not for the first time, Cameron moved quickly on to new territory today - nipping nimbly into micropolitical green issues like clean canals, recycled housebuilding materials, humane and sustainable farming, and species protection. Brown's speech, by contrast, focused on macropolitics - global agreements to reduce carbon emissions, international NGO-driven campaigns against global warming.
Brown seems convinced that Cameron has presented him with one of his beloved political dividing-lines by which the chancellor likes to define the political argument of the day. Cameron's measures are "ill-conceived, short-termist, unworkable and unfair" he was due to say. Brown's own, by contrasts, were "considered, costed, credible and consumer friendly."
This is clearly how Brown sees the green divide. But is it how the public sees it too? I am sceptical. I don't belittle the divide as sketched by Brown, but my guess is that Cameron currently has the advantage over the chancellor on two important counts. The first is that throughout the green debate Brown seems to be playing catch-up to Cameron. It is Cameron who is still setting the terms of the debate - even if Labour thinks he is doing it meretriciously - and Brown who is responding. Cameron's green credibility accordingly looks much more solid than Brown's.
Cameron's second advantage is that he is playing very cannily to the liberal prosperous middle-class voters who deserted Labour over Iraq and whose votes could swing many contests, especially in southern England, when the general election comes. These are voters with both a guilty conscience and a social conscience - and with enough money and a good enough life style to be able to adapt to a bit of high-minded sacrifice for the planet.
Brown's view appears to be that if he can lift the debate on to a higher plain, in which Labour offers a global context for policy action, aid and relief, this will outscore Cameron's apparently more personalised agenda of cycling and recycling, wind turbines in your back yard and caring for butterflies. Brown tried to promote his enthusiasm for lifestyle changes in his Monday speech, but his very New Labour message about "a new contract between empowered and responsible citizens and empowering and responsive governments" goes over people's heads and fails to connect with the wish to do something practical. By contrast, Cameron speaks very directly to environmentally aware voters in a way that Brown fails to emulate. If Cameron can persuade these voters that he is their man, then Brown's weightier appeals could be of little avail among a crucial part of the electorate.
