Brown’s Reaction to Terrorist Threat, So Different From Blair’s, Reassures Many

By ALAN COWELL

LONDON, July 3 — Before Gordon Brown took power as Britain’s new prime minister, there was much talk about whether the electorate would warm to the dour, methodical and detail-driven Scot, particularly after so many years of soaring oratory from his predecessor, Tony Blair.

The answer came more quickly than anyone thought, with the foiled terrorist attacks in London on Friday and at Glasgow Airport on Saturday, just days after Mr. Brown took office.

For his admirers, it seemed, Mr. Brown’s very dourness offered an antidote to the theatrical Mr. Blair.

In a somewhat wooden address to the nation on Saturday and in an interview with the BBC on Sunday, Mr. Brown played down the threat, treating the episodes as a crime rather than a threat to civilization. Yet, his minimalist approach seemed to strike a reassuring chord with Britons, many of whom had expressed fatigue with Mr. Blair’s apocalyptic view of terrorism.

“Gordon Brown has got off to a flying start as prime minister,” Peter Riddell, a political columnist for The Times of London, wrote Tuesday, saying Mr. Brown’s poll ratings for strength and leadership were “soaring” after the thwarted attacks.

He received high marks from civil rights groups as well. “So far, at least, Mr. Brown has passed the first test of his administration,” Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, said Sunday. “He has not played politics with the terror threat, and has treated this weekend’s events as an operational rather than a political matter.”

It is perhaps too early to tell if the low-key approach was a result of Mr. Brown’s personality, his inexperience at the summit of British politics or a matter of political calculation. But the fact that his response has played so well may influence his thinking as he confronts possibly the greatest challenge ahead.

As Mr. Blair’s sometime-loyal lieutenant in 10 years of Labor government, Mr. Brown bears much of the responsibility for the state of a nation in which politicians are mistrusted and people feel disconnected from their leaders. But now he wants to offer a new direction, and very much needs to, if he is going to reverse Labor’s sinking fortunes.

His aim, partly, is to escape the taunts of his opponents that, as Sir Menzies Campbell, the leader of the small opposition Liberal Democrats put it Tuesday, his “fingerprints are all over the scene of the crime” left by Mr. Blair’s decade in office.

On Tuesday in Parliament, Mr. Brown unveiled a list of constitutional changes meant to shed power at the center in favor of the people.

Security alerts across the land, it is true, muted what should have been a showcase speech. But Mr. Brown nonetheless laid out proposals that included the creation of a national security council, greater parliamentary oversight of intelligence gathering and what he called “a more open 21st-century British democracy.”

The creation of a national security council seemed intended to counter a threat from terrorism that he has sought to portray less as a result of perverted Islam — Mr. Blair’s view — than as a crime that should be addressed holistically.

“I have said for some time that the long and continuing security obligation upon us requires us to coordinate military, policing, intelligence and diplomatic action — and also to win hearts and minds in this country and around the world,” Mr. Brown told Parliament.

As he seeks to distance himself from Mr. Blair, though, the new prime minister is not having it all his own way. His political opponents seem determined to tie him to the Blairite policies and, while the sense of national unity created by the terrorist threat offered a respite from confrontation, the honeymoon has proved short-lived.

In Parliament, David Cameron — whose own Conservative Party is in disarray — seized on the past to remind potential voters that Mr. Brown had been a leading player in a government stained by a reputation for spin and untrustworthiness regarding Iraq and other matters.

Mr. Cameron dwelled, for instance, on the fact that Mr. Brown had spent 10 years supporting his predecessor “at the heart of the government that has done more than any other in living memory to destroy trust.”

Indeed, Mr. Cameron assailed Mr. Brown’s political legitimacy, calling him “a prime minister who was not elected by the British people.” (Mr. Cameron was chosen as leader of the Conservatives in 2005 in an internal party competition. Mr. Brown was installed without a real contest as head of the Labor Party.)

In some ways, Mr. Brown has not shed the past. Part of his first response to the foiled attacks of recent days was to blame Al Qaeda, even though security officials shied from that depiction.

Ultimately, too, he will be under pressure, as Mr. Blair was, to balance civil liberties against more draconian security measures.

In practical terms, that means Mr. Brown must decide whether to press for an extension of the permissible period of detention without charge for terrorism suspects to 90 days from 28, and new legislation to permit the use of evidence from wiretaps in court cases.

But he has raised expectations among supporters that the shift in tone will also mean a shift in substance.

Jackie Ashley, a columnist in The Guardian newspaper, said there had been “no amateur dramatics, no histrionics, nothing silly” in Mr. Brown’s muted response to the foiled attacks.

“With his sober assessment of the danger and warnings of the inconvenience we will have to face, he made it clear that knee-jerk responses to atrocities will be a thing of the past,” Ms. Ashley wrote Monday.