Fife gives local boy Gordon Brown the thumbs up

In yesterday's spring sunshine, the latest stop-off point in Gordon Brown's election tour of the country – his home county of Fife – resembled a holiday brochure image of green hills and glistening sea. But the weather was doing little to alleviate local discontents. In Paxton Crescent, Lochgelly, where the prime minister and his wife went doorstepping yesterday, David Black was refurbishing the drive to his house. A self-employed builder, before the recession he wouldn't have had time to work on his own home but he has lost two-thirds of his trade since the housing markets collapsed. "Private housing has dried up, the council isn't doing anything, first-time buyers are struggling. Brown has helped, but this is a long battle," Black said. "He's having to run the country on a shoestring. Let's face it, it doesn't matter what happens. It's the working man who gets it – the ordinary guy who can't afford it." Brown used his homecoming to spell out the tone of the manifesto he intends to publish on Monday. Speaking from a community centre in Cowdenbeath, where as MP he often holds his surgeries, Brown said that his campaign was a simple one, resting on the big three issues: the economy, future industries and jobs creation, and protecting public services. He said: "It is about substance, in the end. Let's be honest, you can have all the pyrotechnics in the world. At the end of the day, people are going to choose how they vote on the basis of substance, and they are going to look below the superficialities, the public relations and the tactics." Peter Livingstone, chairman of the Labour party in Kirkcaldy, which was organising helium-filled Labour balloons to meet the prime minister and his wife in the town's high street, said that the pair are often seen taking a stroll with their children on a Saturday morning but that in any other week it is not part of Labour's election "high-street strategy" and so nobody usually bothers them. Livingstone, who has known Brown since school and was the "childhood friend" mentioned during Brown's interview on Piers Morgan's Life Stories on ITV on 14 February this year, said: "At school he was not flamboyant, quietly clever, always had a cause to fight. Everyone feels they know him here. He's confident with people. It's you people he doesn't like," he added, pointing at the press pack. Brown's campaign team insisted that he would cross the country before the election, meeting voters in their homes and workplace, after being challenged over his choice to come to Kirkcaldy. Was he avoiding confrontation with the public and playing it safe by coming home so soon? "He's going to every part of the country and meeting every kind of voter," said a senior aide. In the community centre, Brown met a local pensioners group. Greta McNeil said she had met him many times around the constituency. "I think he's a nice man," she said. "He's not got Blair's oomph, but we don't want that. With him you know when you've got a cold winter you're going to get the money to turn the heating on. The Tories will take that off you. We like Gordon here." The pressing question is, however, whether the rest of the country will be as kind to Brown as his home town.