Gordon Brown’s brief visit to Afghanistan brought sympathy for his political plight from President Hamid Karzai but his attempts to evoke the Olympic spirit with British troops drew a decidedly cool response from the ranks.

For the travelling pack of reporters, he only had one stock answer bu that didn’t stop them from hounding him with the same question.

Thousands of miles from home, at a press conference in the Afghan capital, Brown was repeatedly probed by reporters about his leadership, or lack of it as his enemies might say.

“We are getting on with the job,” Brown said, when asked about rumoured plots against him.

“It’s a good relationship,” he answered, when quizzed on the supposed aspirations of Foreign Secretary David Miliband. “We get on with the job.”

The journalists even had Afghan President Hamid Karzai discussing the topic.

“Cabinet ministers plotting is nothing new. We have it in Afghanistan too,” he said, smiling.

Brown will be hoping announcements he will make in September of economic measures to give Britons more money in their pockets will ease some of the doubts about his role as party leader.

In the meantime: “I am getting on with the job and that is what people would expect me to do,” he said.

He was in more expansive mood with the troops.

Wearing a dark suit and a purple tie, minus the jacket, told them they were “truly heroes”.

Stood against a backdrop of armoured tanks and trucks, he likened them to Britain’s medal-winning Olympic team in Beijing — only the soldiers made the country proud “every day of the week, every week of the year,” he said.

But the gathering of 300 or so men and women who listened to Brown at the British army headquarters in Camp Bastion, Helmand province, did not respond in kind.

They stood in silence amid the heat and dust. There were no cheers or applause after he wrapped up his patriotic address.

Some, largely those of higher rank, said the high-profile visit did make a difference to troop morale.

Captain Phil Hobbs said: “It shows support. It’s getting leadership involved at every level.”

But the more junior soldiers did not seem overly impressed and had little to say about their drop-in guest.

One said he had preferred the recent entertainment laid on at Bastion of comedy, dancing and a live band. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Brown is no match for a knees-up, especially after a few months in a tent in the desert.

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 A Daily Telegraph poll coming on the heels of all the speculation about David Miliband’s leadership intentions suggests that even if Labour did ditch Gordon Brown, they would still be thrashed in the next general election.

It predicted that with Miliband at the helm, Labour would still only win 24 percent of the vote, against 47 percent for the Conservatives.

The only man, it said, who could make much difference is — Tony Blair.

Do you agree? Is Labour now so unpopular that it cannot win no matter who leads it?

Gordon Brown returns to Westminster today facing a host of negative headlines describing him as a ditherer who has failed to make his mark as prime minister.

The Telegraph reckons Brown’s “failure to define what he stands for is provoking despair even among his loyal supporters” and charts his evolution from a dominant figure in politics under Tony Blair to “Incapability Gordon Brown”.

While Foreign Secretary David Miliband asserts that Brown has “strong values and convictions”, bets are already on for who would be odds-on favourite to take over.

Brown’s cut in the basic tax rate, announced in the 2007 budget, was to be paid for, at least in part, by the abolition of the 10 percent tax rate, but the plan has now turned into a “calculated tax ploy that mutated into a monster”, according to the Independent.

The olive branch offered by Chancellor Alistair Darling to quell the rebellion has prompted outrage, the paper says. It quotes Frank Field, the former minister leading demands for a package of social help for the poorest earners, as saying the measures offered were insufficient. “The talk about bringing forward a package this year or maybe next year just will not do,” Field said.

“If the rebels prevail, Brown could be ousted in days” is The Guardian’s take on Brown’s woes. “For Labour to have scheduled the vote on the 10p tax rate days ahead of the local elections, and with London on a knife edge, seems an act of incompetence so breathtaking that I’m left wondering whether it’s a Baldrick-like cunning plan,” columnist Jackie Ashley writes.

But there is some caution against rushing into finding a new leader. Tribune’s Joan Smith draws parallels to hapless former Prime Minister Anthony Eden: “As the Tories discovered in 1955, some people are not temperamentally suited to the top job and that will almost certainly be posterity’s verdict on Gordon Brown,” she writes. “And while it’s amusing to watch all the people who used to talk up the PM-in-waiting as they scramble to explain their man’s failures, it does leave Labour with a very big problem” — who would be best to replace him?