After a torrid time last week, today's papers offer little relief for the prime minister.
The Financial Times leads with the results of a poll showing 68% of voters are "not confident at all" of the government's ability to deal with the economic crisis. The poll was also run in other countries, with the conclusion being that "Gordon Brown is less trusted to steer his country through the global financial crisis than any other major western European leader", reports the FT.
In its leader, the paper says that Brown, who was feted for his sound management of the economy when chancellor, "has forfeited his trump card".
The FT believes regaining the trust of voters will be tough. "The risk for Mr Brown is that everything he does will now be seen through a prism of stealthy taxation, profligate spending and a falling property market," it writes.
The results of the FT poll are widely reported elsewhere, following hot on the heels of a Sunday Times survey that showed Brown's personal ratings had dropped lower than those of Neville Chamberlain after Hitler's invasion of Norway - a comparison trotted out by a number of today's papers.
Never one for subtlety, the Express runs a story headlined "Labour MPs plot to sack loser Brown". It reports that the former home secretary Charles Clarke "was said to be collecting the names of rebels who would back a leadership challenge if Labour support collapses in the May 1 local elections".
It is stories like that which prompt the Telegraph to give the government a kick up the backside. "The country has neither the time nor the stomach for Labour's self-indulgent in-fighting. It wants concrete measures to ameliorate a fast-deteriorating financial situation," it chides in its leader.
The Independent devotes two pages to the travails of Brown as well as a leader. If Labour MPs and the public are not clear about what the prime minister's vision is, the Indy helps clear things up. "Mr Brown's big goal is a more socially inclusive form of capitalism. He should spell this out and make sure that every member of his team is singing from the same hymn sheet."
In the Guardian, Jackie Ashley calls on Labour to stop the public feuding but berates other journalists, especially those who previously supported Brown, for turning on the PM. She ridicules the comparison to Chamberlain, but herself damns Brown with faint praise.
"There's something distasteful in backing a man, and then, when things turn wrong, instantly joining the chorus of jeering," she writes. "The first thing this debate needs is a sense of proportion, even a whiff of basic fairness. Brown may have been disappointing. But he isn't a disaster. He has been too timid. But that doesn't mean he is a 'coward'."
The papers in question would surely point to the polls and argue they are the messengers rather than the cause of the prime minister's unpopularity. But who do you think is to blame? Does the buck stop with Brown or are the media and/or other Labour ministers complicit?
This is an edited extract from the Wrap, our digest of the daily papers.
