It's not the guy they like... it's the one they trust

Iain Dale writing on David Cameron, The Brand:

A cult of personality has been consciously engendered. He, not the party, is now the Conservative brand. He is a thoroughly modern man whose marketing persona aims at direct comparison with one man - Gordon Brown. The media perceive Cameron to be where the zeitgeist is. By comparison, Brown looks like a man of the past. And that's exactly the way the Cameroons want it.

The opinion polls definitely show Cameron to be more popular (i.e. likeable, affable) than Brown. The crucial question though, "Which man do you think would respond best in a crisis?" gives Brown an overwhelming majority. It is that mistrust of Cameron's political depth, not his "niceness" that will, I suspect, prove his undoing. Despite everything the spin doctors have been doing over the last decade, people would still rather have Alex Ferguson running the team than David Beckham and Posh Spice, or thick and thin as they are otherwise known. As Blair said on Tuesday (I knew I must have agreed with something he said) "Using opinion polls now to predict the outcome of the next general election is like trying to predict the weather forecast in four years time."