Gordon Brown inherited the crown as the time-served heir apparent. Whilst this seems to work well enough for the House of Windsor, it is a recipe for disaster for a political party to adopt the same formula.

The smooth transition from Blair to Brown was no doubt designed to keep the band wagon of New Labour rolling along – business as usual – little realising that the great clunking fists of the weather and world-wide economic instability would expose the flaws in both his vision and personality almost immediately.

Political leadership should never be passed down the line: it must be fought for and won, as Thatcher did in 1979. Brown's vision was to be Blair minus the charisma.

He (and many in the party) thought that people had had enough of Blair's endearingly boyish sense of fun, his playful innocence. They thought that the inten-sely serious, private laddie from north of the border would be the ideal contrast to what had gone before.

So here we are: a leader who wants to be very ordinary whilst the nation faces huge challenges in these now extraordinary times.

The media is offering unhelpful advice to Brown that he had better develop the qualities of a leader when it should have been those qualities that won him the leadership in the first place.

I feel sorry for Brown. I think most people do. They know, as I do, that Brown cannot reinvent himself and, cruelly for him, he must therefore go.

The way ahead is for New Labour to unite the nation to fight for Britain. This is a fight that cannot be won by government. If we are to survive the ecological and economic meltdown that threatens our way of life, the expedient fine tuning of policies favouring one social group over another is not the answer.

There has to be a revolution in our approach to politics economics and community, and that requires vision.

Trevor James, Raglan Street, Hull