Queensferry sees Gordon Brown smile for real

It was like the end of a relationship, one which leaves people heavy with the gut-grip of despair but inwardly airy. On Thursday, that half-hopeful day, Gordon Brown three times at least became himself again, easy, involved, human, and showed he was shrugging his stoic way to the future. Three smiles did it. The first came at about 11am in a polling station in North Queensferry. A van dribbled past with the legend "CAMERON", selling water-coolers. The back-door stencil said "Try Before You Buy!" It's hard to tell if this was what made Gordon Brown smile, but smile he did, as he left the poll with his wife Sarah modelling that incredibly sexy red mac – M&S, we were later told on the plane. Anyway, there was a two-second pause as he emerged from the organised, contained, so pleasantly Scottish hardstone polling station on to the damp grass way above Dalgety Bay, and before he looked at the cameras he looked around, at the panoply and at the water, and simply had a real smile. Not the one he'd been told or trained to do, but his own. He disappeared for the rest of the day to spend an at-home afternoon with nothing to worry him other than making 12,302 frantic phone calls to the world's most lubricious spin-doctors about how to hang on to power. But emerge he did, into Kirkcaldy's Adam Smith Centre, just about the time Adam Boulton on Sky was shouting at a female election-ballot official "Will you be resigning?" because people over whom she had no control, other than having politely invited them to turn up in time to vote, had decided to not do so, and then to riot. Mr Brown didn't hear, busy as he was with handshaking and doing that very touching mutual half-shepherding thing Sarah and he manage. But then came the second real smile. It was to a bunch of ballot-counters. A joke, a Fife joke, was made, and Mr Brown didn't rock on his heels but did that better thing, leant forward on one toe for minutes and simply listened, listened, then that second real smile. Genuine, instant, captivating, unspun. He made a strong speech. He got on the plane, trundling turbulently back from Edinburgh to Stansted. He came to talk to us. Seven reporters were tweeting friends about what Gordon Brown would do. He's in front of you, you diddiebutt morons. There had been many questions about Mr Clegg, what kind of a day had Mr Brown had, and two stupid ones about what law would he make to jail people who closed polls at the time advertised as poll-closing time, and it was salving to see John Simpson with his wilfully non-political book paying no attention other than listening, and then the Observer was able to ask, amid the mad questions: "Please go back, sir, to two years ago. The polls, the press, you were written off. Has David Cameron 'lost' this long election, or have you and your party 'won' it?" And, before he started – "One thing that is absolutely clear is that the Conservatives have not done as well as they were predicting" – he did the third proper smile of that long day, unconsciously, across the backs of the seats of the plane, past the nudging of the cameras which, for all their jostling, missed it. A real, fiery, quick, smart smile. No lugubrious jaw-stuff, nothing taught or untaught: simply a fast grin. "They just expected to waltz into Number 10, didn't they, and me to be the furniture being thrown out." There can be little denying that Gordon Brown hates, viscerally, David Cameron. There was, in that fast grin, a pinprick of victory. A Pyrrhic victory. A Scottish victory. But a victory, of sorts. Gordon Brown smiled, genuinely, at least three times, that day, then in the morning the plane landed to a cotton-stream of purpled dawn on the east horizon. A counterpane, with flimsy sleep invited. But by 1.30 the next afternoon outside Downing Street he was sadly back on track, and the real smile had gone. It was the mad-jaw stuff. Advisers had been telling him how to smile. How to deal. How to charm. Despite the outcome, this is a man who contains a small internal cabinet of smiles, genuine ones, ahead.