I assume, although I am not wholly certain, that most voters will side with the voter, and not the leader caught by a microphone and then caught again being filmed on a radio show listening to the tape, looking as if he was being tortured. The look was accurate. Acutely aware of how this would play, Brown was in political hell.
The entire sequence was destined to happen at some point. Because Brown is obsessed with the media he assumes he is media-aware. He is not. Neither Tony Blair nor David Cameron would make the mistake of continuing to speak when a microphone was still attached to them. But ever since Brown became leader, indeed from the day he launched his campaign to replace Blair, when the autocue blocked the cameras' view of his opening speech, he has shown little awareness of how television works.
Brown has no senior media adviser with him who understands as a matter of instinct that microphones are dangerous instruments. Combine this complacency with his capacity to get explosively angry even when he has no cause to be so, and the ingredients for yesterday's nightmare for Labour were in place.
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