There are some things, you might think, that a world leader would struggle to get wrong. At the top of the list would be things such as waving at people, or eating, tasks that only George W Bush has so far managed to mess up. Soon after would be the duties of office, with their pre-existing protocols and templates; official ceremonies, for example, or letters of condolence. The weekend saw Gordon Brown turn both into public-relations disasters. He even, if you believe the papers, failed at jogging.
Sunday's remembrance ceremony at the Cenotaph in Whitehall did not offer much in the way of opportunities for error. All Brown needed to do was stroll up, place a wreath, step back, bow his head, and wander off. Possibly distracted by the difficulty of walking down the steps backwards, Brown forgot to dip his head in respect. One serviceman dubbed the omission "disgusting", and that was that. Brown had ruined Remembrance Sunday.
His "gaffe" at the Cenotaph was only the first of a double blow to military families, however. It was followed up by a handwritten letter of condolence to the grieving mother of a young soldier killed in Afghanistan, in which he managed to make five spelling mistakes (including the soldier's surname). The fact that Brown is partially sighted, and had nonetheless taken the time to write by hand, was considered irrelevant. The recipient, Jacqui Janes, told The Sun, "I only got through the first four lines before I threw it across the room in disgust."
Yesterday's Daily Mail saw fit to take Brown to task again after he had the audacity to go for a jog in the park. Every inch of the prime minister came under strangely poetic scrutiny, from his "tortured statement of the eyes" and "grimace of desperation" to his "manky socks". His baggy tennis shirt and ballooning tracksuit bottoms were, it concluded, "the sort of outfit that morbidly obese people turn up in at the local leisure centre".
On the world stage, Brown voiced support for a global financial transactions tax, an idea first proposed by a Nobel-prize winning economist and supported by Adair Turner, the head of the Financial Services Authority, only to be slammed by a wave of opposition from the US, Canada and the IMF.
No matter what he says or does, Brown seems bound for bad headlines. They're not hard to imagine: "Brown creates world peace in vicious attack on military jobs"; "PM rescues kitten in assault on feline independence"; "Brown wears gross shoes as he solves Israel-Palestine crisis". With everything he touches turning to mud, he seems now to have reached the point where the best PR team in the world would be telling him to go and hide in a box.
