Just last month, the opposition Conservative Party seemed as close to unbeatable in the upcoming British election as is possible in politics. But last week Gordon Brown, the usually dour prime minister, had reason to be cheerful. According to the latest polls, Brown's Labour Party could yet emerge as the largest party after the election on May 6.

The past year has not been kind to Brown and his government. Rightly or wrongly, U.K. voters' anger over MP expenses and the recession that resulted from the global financial crisis was leveled at Labour. Although some of most headline-grabbing and indefensible claims revealed by the inquiry into MP expenses came from Conservative members, the scandal broke on Labour's watch.

As finance minister for a decade from 1997, it did not escape voter attention that Brown was personally responsible for much of the deregulation of the U.K. financial markets that left the British economy one of the worst affected by the global crash in 2008. Although his fast and adept response to the crisis was admired abroad, not least in Japan, Brown was given very little credit at home for saving Britain's economy from what could have been a much longer and deeper recession.