Hearing Gordon Brown say he’d made mistakes yesterday almost made me jump. Could the Great Clunking Fist really be admitting he’d got something wrong?

I’ve been covering Brown for more than ten years — both at the Treasury and now at No 10. And in all the interviews, international trips and news conferences I have never heard him say sorry.

He’ll usually quotes a blizzard of figures or just repeat what he said, just more emphatically. He certainly would never concede anyone else could be right.

That was much the case when the whole row over the 10 pence tax row started. Brown wouldn’t accept that his abolition of the lowest tax rate could hit millions of poor people.

Fairly or unfairly he maintained that people losing out from scrapping the 10p rate would benefit from other allowances or tax credits. People would come to understand this was a major tax reform — he also cut the basic rate of tax to 20 pence from 22 pence in the pound. Nor were there too many rebels in his own Labour Party.

That changed last week though when nearly 50 Labour MPs looked ready to vote against the government. The Treasury quickly said it would make some concessions in the form of handouts to anyone losing out.

And then on Wednesday, Brown admitted he had made not just one, but two mistakes. He had not thought about the low-paid who didn’t get a tax credit and there was no help for some of the elderly who don’t get pensioners’ tax allowances.

This appears to be the new listening Gordon. His new strategists — former PR guru Stephen Carter and ad man David Muir — must be telling him he has to emote more.

Labour is taking a pounding in the polls and his own personal ratings have dropped sharply over the last six months.

We saw a bit of this a couple of weeks ago. Instead of crying his usual refrain that no country can insulate itself from the ups and downs of the global economy, Brown said he understood people’s concerns, their worries about their well-being.

On top of that, Brown is probably genuinely wounded by people thinking he was robbing the poor to pay the middle classes. One of his lasting legacies running the Treasury for a decade has been a more redistributive focus to tax policy.

He does care about helping the poor, he is never more passionate than when talking about ending poverty in Africa.

The problem is that he doesn’t do touchy-feely very well. Perhaps the great irony is that Conservative leader David Cameron — a child of privilege, educated at Eton and Oxford — does the bloke-next-door so much better than Brown, son of a stern Scottish clergyman.

Cameron often peppers his conversation with everyday slang and talks about “stuff”. Brown finds it hard to stop himself from talking about economic stability, fiscal rectitude and the long-term challenges facing Britain.

Brown may think he is building a better, fairer Britain. He needs to say it better.

Pressure is growing on Gordon Brown to reshuffle his Cabinet after Thursday’s local elections to take some of the sting out of the drubbing his Labour Party is expected to get at the ballot box this week.

Press reports last week suggested Health Secretary Alan Johnson might be in for a promotion. But government sources show no sign that Brown is about to rearrange the decks just yet.

For a start, it’s not really clear a reshuffle now would sort out the government’s problems. Many of the current Cabinet have such little profile that changing their jobs would hardly excite the public imagination.

Also, the big jobs that might cause a stir are really locked down. Brown isn’t about to remove close ally Alistair Darling from the Treasury — it’d be tantamount to admitting the government bore some of the blame for the economy slowing down. The preferred line is to blame the global credit crunch.

Nor does David Miliband look as if he is going anywhere from the Foreign Office. It wouldn’t make political sense to give the young minister often talked about as a future leader of the Labour Party cause for grievance just when the prime minister’s authority is really under scrutiny.

But Brown still really does need what he calls a “diversion” from all the negative press he’s been getting. His popularity has slumped, the economy is slowing down as house prices fall and his backbenchers are no longer afraid of challenging him on the policy front.

So far his answer has been to say people will back him when they see he’s been taking the right long-term decisions. The economy, he says, will be his main focus.

The problem with that is this is exactly how people remembered him when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer for 10 years. As prime minister, he needs to connect better with voters who are looking for a reason to vote Labour again when the party has already been in office for more than a decade.

Brown doesn’t need to change his Cabinet now, he needs to change the way he communicates.

Like Labour’s in Birmingham a fortnight ago, the overall tone of the Conservative Party Spring conference in Gateshead this weekend has been pretty low-key.

Tory strategists say they are not expecting an election until 2010 — they argue that Gordon Brown might want an 2009 contest but will be constrained by a deficit in the polls and an economy that in all likelihood will still be reeling from the global credit crunch.

So there’s been little in the way of substantive new policies this weekend.

Better to keep their powder dry until an election looks closer on the horizon.

Party leader David Cameron instead put the focus of the conference on casting the Conservatives as the party of the family.

“We’re doing very well with older people, but we need to win over the 30 to 40-somethings,” one shadow Cabinet member told me at the futuristic Sage Gateshead conference centre.

He predicted 2008 would be a year of consolidation for the Tories rather than containing any new dramatic turns.

Both main parties would have to see how the ongoing turmoil in financial markets hits the real economy.

Labour also appears to be shying away from any big ideas for now.

Chancellor Alistair Darling’s budget this week was widely derided as boring, though he would argue that stability is key at a time when the economy is being buffeted by a global storm.

The Conservatives say Darling was boring because he didn’t have any money to play with.

But they’ve not really said what they would do themselves, beyond a vague, long-term commitment to tax cuts.

With the polls volatile, both parties are now scrapping for the same centre-ground with micro-measures targeted at particular groups.

It will take some bold ideas before either can pull away and be certain of victory at the next election.

You can see what Shadow Chancellor George Osborne had to tell my colleague Tim Castle about possible tax cuts under a future Tory government here and the Northern Rock rescue here .