Which newspaper declared that "whatever happens, Gordon Brown will be one day remembered as a great chancellor"? Wrong. The answer is the Daily Mail. Surely this love affair can't last

Here is a tale of two newspapers, both successful by modern standards and both implacably right-wing, but each different in its opinion of Gordon Brown. It is, in a way, a mystery story.

The first paper is the Daily Telegraph, whose columnists, leader writers and reporters seem unanimous in the view that Brown can do no right. The Chancellor, they believe, has wrung untold billions from the purses of innocent, industrious people and squandered them on ideologically driven schemes that have weakened enterprise, increased dependency on the state and generally made Britain worse.

His personality is as flawed as his politics. A "ruthless faction fighter", he has sat in No 11 for a decade, plotting, sulking, bullying (no paper is more attached to that quotation about his "big clunking fist"), meddling and centralising. If he has presided over ten years of economic growth it has been a matter of luck or window-dressing, or else it has been a vast miscalculation for which, in due course, we will all have to pay a terrible price.

Most of all, the Telegraph blames Brown for the pensions crisis. The columnist Jeff Randall put it in a nutshell: "Like a two-bob mugger at a sink-estate bus stop, Gordon Brown has been caught with his hand in the pensioner's purse." (Randall loves metaphors, though he works them a little hard. Blair, for example, could never just be "the king of conmen" for Randall; he would have to be ermined, anointed, crowned, orbed, sceptred and enthroned upon the Stone of Scone.)

Many Telegraph readers are pensioners - the statistics suggest 39 per cent are over 65 - and the letters columns are red-hot with their pensions wrath. But I'm sure the paper would take the same view even if it were not so; after all, this is no more than we expect from a Tory daily writing about a chancellor who, though no one is sure whether he is old Labour or new, is definitely Labour.

Which brings us to the Daily Mail. Read this, which appeared in the Mail a few weeks ago: "Very few chancellors have left the Treasury in such good shape as Gordon Brown." And this, from another editorial: "Gordon Brown . . . has presided over ten years of steady economic growth, with none of the lurches from boom to bust that blighted so many of his predecessors." And this, by Stephen Glover: "Whatever happens, Mr Brown will be one day remembered as a great chancellor."

It is a remarkable thing, but Brown has had few more loyal supporters in the press than the Mail. (It has been conspicuously more enthusiastic about him, in fact, than this magazine, which is occasionally and mistakenly described as Brownite.)

There has been criticism, especially about the pensions business, but the Mail's coverage has been mainly positive. Where the Telegraph sees faults, the Mail sees virtues; where the Telegraph blames Brown, the Mail blames Blair. The Mail promoted Brown's recent book - with an extract about Edith Cavell - and ran a warm profile of him by Mary Riddell. And then there are the attack dogs that aren't barking: Melanie Phillips, Richard Littlejohn and the rest have been quiet about Brown (though Littlejohn has the odd pop). David Cameron could only dream of such treatment.

As political cross-dressing goes, this must be a contender for the Danny La Rue prize, and you have to wonder how long it can last. Gossip, roundly denied by the paper, suggests that the Mail's editor, Paul Dacre, is taking a break and that his surrogates might give Brown a rougher ride. But Dacre's respect for Gordon Brown must have deep roots - otherwise the paper would never have adopted such an unexpected position. It will not be killed off by stand-ins, or in a month. On the other hand, backing Brown as prime minister, in the frame for such things as immigration and crime, will be far harder for the Mail than backing a chancellor who kept inflation low.

Aphorism corner

The Sunday Mirror brought news recently of a Conservative focus-group study of the Cameron effect which mentioned suspicions that the party rank and file might not be keeping up with change: "One respondent compared the Tories to a British telephone box, which looks appealing on the outside, but if you open the door, it smells really bad."

No less arresting an image came in the verdict, reported in the Telegraph on 3 May, of the old lady in Fife who did not like the cut of Alex Salmond's jib: "There's a man so pleased with himself he'd drink his own bathwater."

But the line from the papers that I find myself quoting most these days isn't political, or even new. A recent letter to the Guardian recounted how Louis Armstrong was once asked whether jazz was folk music. "Man, it's all folk music," he replied. "I ain't heard horses do it yet."

Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University

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