Matthew d’Ancona thinks that Gordon Brown may have some genuinely Big Ideas.

Stand by for a huge constitutional debate: that was one of many messages to be drawn from Gordon Brown’s launch this morning. Asked whether his plans included a written constitution, he would only say that he favoured a “better constitution”. But there was an explicit promise to curb the Crown prerogative, make Parliament more powerful, submit certain government appointments to parliamentary oversight, and (less overtly) entrench citizens’ rights and responsibilities in some way. Gordon left us is no doubt that he is thinking big.

Meanwhile, over on OpenDemocracy.net, Anthony Barnett sets out a list of what a new constitutional settlement would have to cover.

Sorry to be a bore about this (er, see here, here and here) but the recent ICM poll for the Guardian confirms my suspicion — that Labour won’t win the next election if they are led by Gordon Brown.

Gordon Brown is failing to persuade the public that he would make a better prime minister than David Cameron, according to a Guardian/ICM poll published today which suggests the Conservatives could win a working majority at the next general election.

Voters give the Tories a clear 13-point lead when asked which party they would back in a likely contest between Mr Brown, Mr Cameron and Sir Menzies Campbell.

The result would give the party 42% of the vote against Labour on 29%, similar to its performance under Michael Foot in 1983. The Liberal Democrats would drop to 17%. The result is the highest that the Conservatives have scored in any ICM poll since July 1992, just after their last general election victory…

The Economist‘s Bagehot column has some interesting reflections on this.

Three quite big and important things appear to be going on. The first is that a sort of positive feedback loop has been established in which the long-standing misgivings about Mr Brown within his own party are now being projected back to it by the voters. Senior Labour figures glumly go through the motions of declaring in public their utter confidence in Mr Brown’s prime-ministerial credentials. He is the most successful chancellor of the exchequer since records began, a political heavyweight of towering intellectual stature and soaring moral purpose. It’s a testimonial just close enough to the truth not to provoke sniggers, but they and we know it’s only half the story. What increasingly worries ministers, and those Labour MPs in southern seats whose majorities hang by a thread, is that, unless he can reveal a different side to his personality, dour, stiff, slightly odd Mr Brown will struggle to reach those aspiring middle-class voters whom Mr Blair could still just about deliver in 2005.

The second big thing is that the mood of the electorate seems to be swinging from apathetic boredom and irritation with the government to a feeling that maybe it’s time for a change. If that is right, Mr Brown, for all his admirable qualities, is the last person on earth who can deliver it. However much Mr Brown and his supporters insist that Labour will look very different when he is prime minister, the fact is that Mr Brown is universally recognised as the joint-architect of the government’s successes and failures. It is hard to see what sort of meaningful fresh start Mr Brown can offer.

That was the argument made last week by Frank Field, an independent-minded Labour MP. Mr Field reminded his colleagues that the Tories were able to win a remarkable fourth successive election partly because Margaret Thatcher’s replacement, Mr Major, emerged from nowhere. Even Mrs Thatcher, who backed Mr Major’s leadership bid, had only the haziest idea what he was really like (and was bitterly disappointed when she found out). But it meant that the Tories were able to claim plausibly that by choosing the obscure, untainted Mr Major they had already given the voters the change they demanded.

Mr Field went on to suggest that if Labour was serious about winning it should thank Mr Brown for his outstanding service and move on to the next generation in the shape of David Miliband, the 41-year-old environment secretary who for some time has been uncomfortably cast in the role of next-leader-but-one. That is where Mr Field’s line of reasoning runs out of steam…

Agreed. Miliband is a nice lad (and he’s driven around in a Prius), but not Premiership material. Labour’s problem is that they have nobody else in Cameron’s generation who has leadership potential. Game over, I suspect.

Frank Luntz is an American pollster who believes in ‘people meter’ research — where members of a focus group indicate — second by second — by moving a knob whether they’re approving or disapproving of a political speaker. He did some of this research for BBC2’s Newsnight last week and was roundly criticised for his pains. Here’s part of his response.

In the past weeks a number of Labour-leaning columnists have laid out the case for why Gordon Brown should be the next leader of Labour. But what you never hear is why he will be the next elected prime minister.

Interestingly, the voters in my session came out clearly in favour of John Reid, not Gordon Brown, as the next party leader. Polly Toynbee, writing in The Guardian last week, suggested dismissively that it was just because of the “hesitant” Brown response to a reporter’s questions about his role in the leadership coup and “the full-on harangue” Reid recently unleashed against the legal system.

Actually, she’s correct — but she ignores the significance in her conclusion. You be the judge. Here’s exactly what Reid said that made the Labour-leaning voters sit up in their seats, nod their heads and cheer: “Any system which allows foreign prisoners back on our street without even considering deportation has something wrong with it — full stop. No qualifications. A court judgment that puts the human rights of foreign prisoners ahead of the right to safety of UK citizens is wrong — full stop. No qualifications. A Parole Board decision that emphasises the rights of a convicted murderer over the rights and safety of his potential victims is tragically, murderously wrong — full stop.”

The “people meters” soared, and it was the single best-received language of the evening. To Toynbee that was a full-on harangue. But to Labour-leaners and floating voters it was good plain common sense. Could you imagine Brown speaking with such emotional clarity? Could you imagine Brown with such steely determination?

I dislike Reid intensely. He is a typical ex-Communist thug who has simply done a 180-degree ideological shift. These guys never change their spots. But there is one silver lining in the cloud of a possible Reid leadership. Roy ‘Fat Boy’ Hattersley has declared that he will shoot himself if Reid becomes Labour’s leader.