LONDON — British Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently had a long, bad week, but he has only himself to blame.
In September, while riding high in the polls after a successful Labour Party conference, he seemed to be considering the idea that he should call a general election to confirm that the successor to Tony Blair had an electoral mandate.
The impression that an election was imminent appeared to be confirmed by various developments. Brown visited Iraq during the opposition Conservative Party conference and announced from there, in a patent effort to attract media attention away from the conference, that 1,000 British troops would be home by Christmas. He had previously promised that all such policy statements would be made in Parliament. (Five hundred of the troops had already come home.)