You have to say that Gordon’s a trier. The day before polling in the local and London mayoral elections and he’s spraying treats around for everybody.

It was a Blairite tactic to try and be all things to all people and, while it was all too transparent for those who could be bothered to look, there was at least a veneer of arrogant calm about it. Brown, while using the same methods, comes across as having an air of sweaty desperation.

First up is the use of the ‘masochism strategy‘. Blair employed this in the run up to the Iraq war and the last general election. In short, it involves submitting yourself to a media grilling, letting people get it off their chest and then you carrying on regardless despite telling people you are listening and learning.

Brown’s two interviews on the radio this morning were excruciating, with Five Live’s Nicky Campbell in particular giving the Prime Minister a right old clout. Listen to the interview here and wince at Campbell’s opening rope-a-dope before giving Brown a big old uppercut. Brown didn’t fare much better with John Humphreys on Radio 4. He gabbled about taking ‘the long term decisions’ twice in his opening sentence.

You’d think, with him banging on an on and on and on about the long term decisions he’s making, that Brown is promising ladles of jam tomorrow but I get the feeling he doesn’t really like jam. What we seem to be being told is to look forward to things still being grey, just not any darker a grey.

And then we get the rash of ‘eye-catching initiatives’ (another Blairite gambit) just in time for the polls opening. Yesterday it was Gordon and his ‘lethal’ skunk and anti-scientific approach to cannabis for the Daily Mail readers. Today it was him personally intervening to prevent the pay rise for prisoners for The Sun’s readers (he ‘blew his top’ no less, said an anonymous ‘Government source’). The Guardian readers got a promise to give grassroots Labour activists more say in policy formulation after the elections.

See? He’s trying to please all the people all of the time (although, to be fair, stopping the prisoner pay rise smacks more of panic than a deliberate ploy to woo voters). He’s a one man good cop/bad cop routine. Nice for the Guardian readers, nasty for the Mail and Sun readers.

The difference between the two is that the announcement on prisoner pay is already a concrete ‘no way’ and the one on cannabis seems to be being spun nicely in advance. Gordon’s olive branch to the Labour rank and file has a big catch up front:

But party officials have decided the criticisms will be sent only to the relevant elected regional members on the national policy forum, the party’s deliberative policy-making body, and will not be centrally published.

And if one or two criticisms fall behind the filing cabinet? Well that’s just the normal administrative difficulties we’ve come to expect. Still, nice of him to tell the activists he’s giving them a sniff of participation just when he needs them to get off their arses to ratify his leadership.

A good cop/bad cop routine doesn’t work though if the suspect sees through both sides of the act. The Guardian readers are going to be pissed off at his announcements for the Sun and the Mail readers. The Sun and the Mail readers are going to hate the idea of giving hairy left wingers a say in running the country (although they’d probably hate the prisoner pay thing as well if they’d only stop thinking for a moment that the criminal justice system is built on vindictiveness and think what reoffending costs the taxpayer every year).

All this doesn’t seem to have occurred to the Number 10 press office. That’s a mess to be sorted after the polls close on Thursday night.