Gordon Brown is paving the way for an election that Cameron will lose

Whatever your politics, you have to admire Gordon Brown for pulling his latest trick. Despite raising the overall tax take in his budget, people will remember the Chancellor for his 2p cut in income tax. Long criticised for his socially awkward personality (on a visit to a hospital, he once asked a nurse "how's modernisation going?"), he's also working hard to display his softer side to voters. Meanwhile, David Cameron has been proposing environmental taxes that appear to penalise people more even more than the government is. The Tories, once the party of small government appear to want make big government even bigger. Should Gordon Brown become Prime Minister and call a snap election tomorrow, he might actually end up winning!

David Cameron seems to have forgotten that oppositions don't win elections, government's lose them. He has been so busy currying favour with the Guardian Intelligentsia, he's forgotten about wooing disaffected voters. Since becoming the leader of the opposition, he has had numerous opportunity to attack the government: over the mess it has made of immigration policy, over the violent prisoners who are released from jail, and over the terrorists who are never deported just to name a few policies. But ever fearful of appearing too "right wing", "nasty" or "populist" he has preferred to spend his time in the arctic circle posing for photographs on glaciers. It's a measure of where British politics are today that politicians worry more about the opinions of trendy liberals in Islington or Hampstead than they do about the opinions of the man in the street.

Maybe it's time for David Cameron to come down to earth. If he continues to ignore ordinary voters any longer, his campaign will melt down a lot faster than any of those glaciers will.