Does Gordon Brown need to be likeable to win the next election?

Last week, the Chancellor delivered the most remarkable and far-reaching pre-Budget report on record.

Politicians, economists and historians will debate it for years - to say nothing of the rest of us who will be counting the cost, even if it goes to plan.

Her Majesty cannot hope to match up - the first and last time she will be outshone by Alistair Darling.

No one expects much heavy legislative lifting anyway. Gordon Brown has made clear that he views the economy as his trump card and doesn't intend to roll out one of those fiddly Blair-memorial speeches, promising to transform life as we know it.

I also believe that Mr Brown is still considering the prospect of an election before 2010. Nothing he has said in the past few weeks has ruled this out (he merely says it is tactless to talk about it, which is a different question). So the intention is to clear the decks and focus on defining issues of his premiership, in order to keep his options open.

Welfare and the intention to prod single parents to work underline his claim to be a tough but fair improver of social and economic conditions for the worst off. Lower-middle earners are to be protected from too much discomfort in the downturn, while the more prosperous foot the bill.

This is the latter day Brownite creed, shorn of its niceties: and he now sees no need to conceal or water it down. "Be yourself," friends have urged Mr Brown and for better or worse, this time, he will be.

But the Government also contends with a mood which is deflating its hopes of a "recession bounce". It suffers from a lasting attack of unlikeability. The shock of this recognition has hit ministers hard in the wake of the pre-Budget report they thought would establish their leadership in a crisis. The mood afterwards has been more suspicious than grateful.

A BBC Question Time audience in Basildon, a key Tory target seat, brought this point home last week. The ferocity of the audience's attack on Douglas Alexander, the minister representing the Government, was unrelenting. It reminded me of being on the same platform with Michael Portillo, on the eve of the 1997 election. Whatever defence of the Conservative Government he mounted, the reaction was to bay for blood. Mr Portillo retired that evening mute and shaking his head - and wisely decided that a career in the media might be less aggravating

Exhibit two: Jacqui Smith, inserted into the Home Office after the bull-in-a-china-shop years of Messrs Blunkett and Reid, to take the aggressive edge off the clashes on security and crime.

Ms Smith fully denies that she knew about the arrest of the Tory frontbencher Damian Green and the ransacking of his offices in advance.

So far, no evidence has emerged to contradict her. Any minister who did get involved would have to be extremely short-sighted about the consequences.

Yet the widely-held belief has been that the Government must be involved in some skulduggery. Ms Smith was vaunted by Labour last year as one of its "normal" minsters we would grow to like. Now her expression of exhausted shock betrays the realisation that she is roundly distrusted, and cannot quite work out what she did to deserve it.

This generalised tension goes some way towards explaining the schizoid nature of Mr Brown's poll ratings. He has periods when his stock rallies and he commands the TV screens as the Man Who Can (at a price) guide the UK through its grimmest situation in decades.

That alone won't see him back to No 10 though. "It is improbably hard to win a fourth term," says one senior insider. "You have to offer some very special combination of luck and talents to do it."

To which I would add: people have to be broadly content to have you around for another four years. Mr Brown has stopped the Conservative advance and shown that David Cameron has not yet really clinched anything like a certain majority - extraordinary, after the long Tory exile from power.

What he has not done is to turn the prospect of another Labour Government into something we might positively want to vote for. His own standing and persona will be crucial here: people feel they "know" a Clinton, or Blair, or Obama, when, of course, they don't - and might not like them if they did.

Mr Brown feels hard to know, and whatever his trusties say about his private amiability, that is one key reason people feel unsure about another stint of him in charge.

His strategists' plan is to make Labour less contentious in areas outside the main economic fray. "I'm not sure he can be liked," says one senior backbencher and ally, "but we could try to ensure we aren't hated for unnecessary reasons."

So out goes the communication data bill today - which would have guaranteed the authorities the right to monitor private communications: a dead parrot, like 42 days' detention. I asked one experienced Home Office insider what had gone wrong: "No political mileage in it," was the short response.

Mr Brown, unlike Mr Blair, has a limited appetite for arguments about national security. He is no civil libertarian himself, but he is aware that these arguments cause more bad feeling than can ever be compensated for in terms of the elusive "security bonus".

Also, he intends to keep his powder dry for a bitter internal row with the unions on welfare reform. Implacability is an asset here. It can easily go wrong if interpreted as vindictiveness. Peter Lilley discovered as much when his "little list" of single mums on housing lists deepened the impression that the Tories were all head and little heart.

Now we have a generation's experience to prove that leaving poor single parents to rot in poverty, without the structure of a working life, has been a social disaster. But the new measures come late and contend with a downturn in the labour market, New Labour having omitted to get on with it when conditions were propitious. It will take up more of the Government's time and political capital than it may yet fully know.

Most ministers will tell you that it is easy to be liked: and the tricky part is implementing what you want. The reality is often more punishing. A politician of certain intent, departmental experience, a lot of drive and a bit of guile can get things done.

It is still being seen as an asset at the end of it all that is the hard part. Mr Brown is in the process of discovering just how difficult that really is.