Gordon Brown's ability to evade blame once had him known as the "Macavity of politics", says Rachel Sylvester in The Daily Telegraph. But now "Teflon Gordon has turned into Superglue Brown."
Hard on the heels of the still unresolved Northern Rock fiasco, and the admission that HMRC had lost half the country's personal data, the beleaguered Prime Minister has been fending off criticisms from the armed forces about inadequate troop equipment, and most recently has had to promise to return more than £600,000 in suspicious political donations after the resignation of the party's general secretary, Peter Watt.
The stream of crises is clearly taking its toll after a relatively calm early summer, we are now back to "old Gordon", complete with "the shaking hand, the beetle brow and the scowl," says Jackie Ashley in The Guardian.
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His biggest worry, as Philip Webster noted in The Times, is that the fabric of his appeal to the electorate "competence, trust and a commitment to clean up politics" looks "threadbare".
Indeed, in the space of mere weeks the government has begun to resemble the hapless Major administration after Black Wednesday, which ended up submerged under a tide of "lies, speculation, rent-boys and mistresses", says Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph.
The latest ComRes poll for The Independent shows the Conservatives on a 13-point lead over Labour, their biggest for 19 years, and enough to give them a 64-seat majority in a general election.
At the heart of Labour's woes, says Matthew Parris in The Times, is the feeling that Brown "isn't up to the job". The electorate seems to be sensing that the party's "chickens are coming home to roost" after more than a decade in power and despite the lack of an obvious successor, the Labour party may come to view him as a liability to be dispensed with. "Mr Brown could become the Steve McClaren of British politics".
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