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.
A poll for the BBC has indicated that the vast majority of the public want British troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan within the next year.
