Prime Minister Gordon Brown looked decidedly unhappy when he strode into the panelled briefing room at Number 10 Downing Street to hold his last press conference of the year. He growled at reporters who asked uncomfortable questions about a run on a British bank that some experts thought he should have foreseen, about the carelessness of government officials who had lost reams of personal data on millions of British citizens, and about his decision to pull back British troops from the Iraqi city of Basra and leave it in the hands of unruly militants. Mr. Brown had reason to be grumpy. He has suffered a catastrophic reversal of fortunes.

When Tony Blair handed over the reins of office to his former number two last June, most people thought the country would be in what the British call “a safe pair of hands.” It was not long before Mr. Brown had a chance to show his stuff. He had barely stepped next door from the job of Chancellor of the Exchequer at Number 11 to the Prime Minister's job at Number 10, when Britain was hit with a series of disasters of almost Biblical proportions. The country suffered catastrophic floods, attempted suicide bombings, blue tongue disease in farm animals and even a touch of the dreaded bird flu. Indeed, almost everything but a plague of locusts.

At first, Mr. Brown's gloomy stoicism seemed to be an asset. He might not have Mr. Blair's charm, but he was reliable and showed he could handle problems. That was what the British thought at first. After all, they had seen Mr. Brown at work for a decade as chancellor, keeping the British economy ticking with high growth and low inflation.

In fact, he looked so good in the polls that he almost called a snap general election in the autumn. And then he suddenly changed his mind when a new series of polls showed the Conservative party was gaining ground on him, and he told what sounded like a lie. Or at least not the whole truth. Mr. Brown insisted his decision not to ask for an early election had nothing to do with the polls. That was the turning point. Since then, it seems Mr. Brown can do nothing right.

In the public eye, he has gone from being an honest, businesslike Scot, to becoming a weak, vacillating and devious politician. That may or may not be true, but in politics, public perception is everything.

The Labor Party was found to have broken campaign financing rules, and the secretary general of the party was forced to resign. Britain's feisty press shouted “sleaze” and tried to make some of it stick to Mr. Brown.

Then when a government office lost some computer disks containing the of names, addresses and bank account numbers of millions of British citizens, that was also blamed on Mr. Brown. Other cases of government mishandling of personal details were splashed across the front pages. Some of the data had been outsourced to the United States and India!

But that was only a prelude to the biggest bombshell. Mr. Brown, the canny Scot and safe pair of hands, was seen to have grossly mismanaged the government's reaction to a scary run on the Northern Bank. He poured tens of billions of taxpayers' money into a rescue operation that has so far only postponed the day of reckoning.

Oh dear. It could hardly get worse than that. But it did. Not only did the poor Mr. Brown look incompetent and a little devious, he also shot himself in the foot with a spectacularly clumsy bit of public relations management. On the day he was supposed to go to Lisbon for the ceremonial signing of the treaty that will be (in all but name) the new constitution for the European Union, he found that he had a “prior commitment” to meet some members of parliament in London. So he was absent from the signing ceremony, and flew to Lisbon later in the day to sign the document discretely when the main ceremony was over. Did this strange behavior have anything to do with the fact that the Labor Party had promised the British public it would hold a referendum before approving the treaty? Was Mr. Brown afraid to be seen lining up with the other European leaders in Lisbon? Of course not, he insisted. He just had a diary conflict. Now, Mr. Brown not only looked incompetent and untruthful. He looked silly. That is about as bad as it can get for a politician.

But stay tuned. He can remain in office for another two years, unless he changes his mind again and decides on an early election.

As former Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson once famously remarked, “a week is a long time in politics.” The way things are going for Mr. Brown, two years may seem like an eternity.