At the end of the summer Gordon Brown faced a host of severe challenges. But contrary to most predictions he's still standing, while his internal critics are nowhere to be seen

How Brown bounced back

The search is on for the "Brown Bounce". Everybody seems to be looking out for it. After a period in which the Prime Minister plumbed the depths of unpopularity, each new opinion poll is scrutinised excitedly by the media, ministers and their opponents for signs of a remarkable recovery. So far the most that can be claimed is that the search goes on. Figures suggest the Conservatives retain a diminished but still commanding lead. The opinion poll watchers are not observing the equivalent of a spectacular trampoline jump, more a sign of flickering life.

But the animated hunt for the bounce is in itself significant. It reflects a political mood unrecognisable from the one that prevailed only a few weeks ago. At the end of the summer a downcast cabinet minister, one of the few still loyal to Brown at the time, outlined to me the seemingly impossible challenges that the Prime Minister faced. He needed to reshuffle his cabinet in ways that made waves, although his scope to do so was limited by the extreme fragility of his own position. At the same time Brown had to address the dysfunctional operation at No 10, a seemingly impossible task given he had only recently appointed some of the senior figures who were meant to be running the creaky prime ministerial machine. The minister also suggested Brown needed to bring in to the heart of his operation more of those that he trusted and could work with. This seemed out of the question, too.

Fast forward to the present, and not for the first time in his career Brown has achieved all those limited but seemingly impossible objectives. In doing so he is displaying the willfulness and agility of Harold Wilson, another prime minister who hung on against the odds. Wilson's critics would berate him for being too transparently political, and yet the old conjuror continued to pull off the tricks. The way Brown has gone about saving his political skin highlights his flaws as well as some underestimated strengths, but he is still standing and his internal opponents are nowhere to be seen.

Blairites with knives in their backs might splutter, but one minister says that “the untold story about Gordon is that he is too nice”

Quite often Brown is to be found standing in a new Downing Street "war room", one of the most important changes in recent weeks. The No 10 operation has been almost comically transformed from the partitioned paranoid feuding of a few months ago into an open-plan office where there is nowhere obvious to hide. It is the equivalent of moving from Hamlet's Elsinore, where no one knew who was lurking behind an arras, to David Brent's office in Slough. Key figures function in this open space, quite a few of them new to No 10, with Brown appearing several times a day to see what is going on.

In his dealings with colleagues Brown can be both loyal and brutal, thoughtless and solicitous, bullying and self-effacing. The repertoire has been on full display in recent weeks as he has made his moves. But again, the fact that he has had the space to display these traits is significant. He was supposed to be doomed.

A Brown admirer from within Downing Street notes critically that he reacts to some colleagues in the same way young children respond to Christmas presents. At first Brown can be excited by new recruits; then he can quickly lose interest. This is what happened to Stephen Carter, who has been moved out of No 10 to become a minister in the Lords. In January the political outsider Carter was brought in to run the entire operation. Within a couple of months Brown had lost interest in him. In effect Carter's role is being performed by the Cabinet Office minister, Liam Byrne, a figure more alert to the political nuances of what is still a tense and confused government.

Another view from inside the government is that Brown is too loyal to colleagues. As one minister who had been pressing for changes in Downing Street for months put it, "the untold story about Gordon is that he is too nice". Some Blairites with knives in their backs might splutter at such an observation, but the changes of recent weeks also show the degree to which Brown is loyal when he chooses to be. Peter Mandelson insisted that Brown's press secretary, Damian McBride, be moved as a condition for his return. Some of Brown's closest allies, but by no means all of them, had also complained about McBride's activities. It is difficult to exaggerate the degree to which Brown was in danger from his cabinet colleagues because they were convinced, sometimes wrongly, that McBride was briefing against them. Brown had no choice but to move his loyal press secretary, but McBride is still there, at the heart of the new open-plan office, working closely with Byrne and the other cabinet office minister, Tom Watson.

Above all, and again this has a child-like quality, Brown needs close allies to be available around the clock, even more so in the current financial crisis. Last year, when Brown first heard that Northern Rock was on the verge of collapse, he wanted immediately to contact his old allies from the Treasury, Ed Balls and Shriti Vadera. As Schools Secretary Balls was unavailable, visiting a school in Bristol. Vadera was abroad in her role as a minister at the Department of International Development. Now Brown has institutionalised his dependency on trusted advisers with the setting up of the economic council. It was widely seen as a gimmick, but it is more than that. The council brings together the likes of Vadera and the former banker and hedge fund manager Paul Myners, another newly ennobled minister who has been a trusted adviser for several years and who joins the small list of people who must be ready to respond to a prime ministerial call around the clock.

None of this means that Brown has waved a Wilsonian wand and is free from the nightmares of the previous 12 months. If Labour continues to perform badly in the polls, the changes will be the source of another fresh set of internal tensions. Already some government insiders note that some of the people working in the new look No 10 do not know precisely what they are supposed to be doing. There is also talk of new turf wars between senior civil servants. One of Brown's ministerial critics suggests that if the Prime Minister was the coach driver on a schools outing and the coach broke down, he would hold a review as to what had gone wrong, appoint three more drivers to help him get to his destination and a new set of navigators. However, he would not fix the coach.

Yet there is a new optimism in No 10 and beyond, a fresh sense of energy and a hope that they are back in the game. Already there are signs of a more strategic focus, bizarrely missing from Brown's traumatic first year. One insider has studied in depth the Conservatives' revival under John Major as they went on to win a fourth consecutive election in 1992 in the midst of economic gloom. He points out that in 1991 Tory ministers attacked Labour almost as if they were the opposition. Brown has told his new team that as the next election moves closer they must act in a similar fashion, becoming like an opposition in government, attacking the Conservatives more vigorously after having given them a free hand over the past year. There is talk within No 10 of relentlessly raising questions about the judgements of the Tory leadership - or their "serial misjudgements", as one of them puts it.

Again, this flurry of excitement might prove to be misplaced, not least because Brown's judgements in relation to economic decisions are bound to be a focus in the pre-election period. Nonetheless, no one can question that Brown has made the important internal changes that are a precondition to any broader recovery.

A common view is that he was able to act under the protective cover of the financial crisis. Obviously the crisis has played its part. But the mutineers were never as strong in their resolve as they fleetingly appeared to be. The risks of regicide were huge, and the ultra-Blairites who urged David Miliband to adopt a provocatively high profile in the run-up to the Labour conference did him no favours. Over the previous year Miliband had become a leader-in-waiting without trying. The moment he started to try with such an ostentatious effort he ceased to be the leader-in-waiting.

The epoch-changing collapse of the financial markets is significant for a different but related reason. Brown has rediscovered his public voice, the only one he seems happy with. When he first became Prime Minister he adopted a deliberately apolitical tone. He was the father of the nation looking for a national consensus. Politely he attacked David Cameron for "flip flopping" on a range of policies, but he was too timid to make any onslaughts from an ideological position. He was in favour of "conviction" and not much else that was easily identifiable. In reality Brown was desperate to win an election, and the chaotically public plans for an early poll last autumn blew his cover as a consensual national leader. He lost his voice.

Neurotically fearful of alienating the Daily Mail, and at least as obsessed with securing a big tent of support as Tony Blair was, Brown could not find a new one for the following 12 months. The financial crisis has done the work for him. Here he is in a speech to business leaders last week, once more hailing an apolitical crusade: "If we come together as a country, we can come through these times stronger and not weaker". And here he is in the House of Commons teasing Cameron for flip flopping: "Which side is the right hon gentleman on the side of: what he said two weeks ago, or the side of what he said a week ago?". Brown's public repertoire is too narrow and over-rehearsed, but he is at ease once more because he is lucky enough to have found his limited prime ministerial voice. He has become again the figure he was during his first summer in No 10.

Whether all this will be enough to bring about a Brown bounce that propels Labour to a fourth term is doubtful. It remains one of the oddities of the current extraordinary situation that a recession has brought him back to life. Even so, a senior figure who worked in Downing Street under Blair, and who is no fan of Brown, tells me that he predicts Labour will be ahead in the polls this spring. The fact that it is not entirely out of the question, and that it is considered a near certainty that Brown will lead his party into the next election, is a turnaround almost as dramatic as the Prime Minister's collapse in popularity a year ago.

Steve Richards is chief political commentator for the Independent and a contributing editor of the New Statesman

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