Defiant and decisive, Brown takes a gamble at last... and bores critics into submission

Forced to bring forward his appearance to before the General Election after his opponents cried foul, Mr Brown's time came

yesterday. And boy, was it a test of endurance for those determined –

or required, for professional reasons – to watch the PM be cross-examined at length about his role in the planning, and execution, of the Iraq invasion.

Staying alert during the big bruiser's Parliamentary droning – when he has a tendency to reel off lists of figures and resort to economic jargon – can be enough of a challenge, but this went on for more than four hours.

Important stuff indeed, the detail was impressive in parts, but it was tough going as Mr Brown reverted to being Chancellor for a day.

It was so different from Tony Blair's appearance, but then we well know the two are very different beasts.

While his predecessor swept in through a back door under cover of darkness, Mr Brown walked in – and later left – through the front door with his head down.

While Mr Blair began with terror etched on his face, Mr Brown got straight down to business. And while Mr Blair enraged families whose sons and daughters have died in the conflict – and critics of the war in general – by saying "no regrets", Mr Brown was not about to take the same approach.

After all, Mr Blair no longer cares who he upsets because it does not matter any more, but his successor has a General Election to try and win in less than two months.

So he wasted no time in telling the panel that "any loss of life is something that makes us very sad indeed" and acknowledgingthe "sacrifices" of those servicemen and women who

paid for the conflict with their lives and limbs.

It felt like a cricketer getting off the mark with a solid drive off the middle of the bat, as Mr Brown eased himself into the hearing

just as he would have wanted. Later he would end it by speaking of the "debt of gratitude" owed to those who died.

It was one of several lines which Mr Brown – who many suspect

had been preparing for the hearing when he ducked out of Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday, for which he blamed South African President Jacob Zuma's state visit – had clearly prepared, one of the "key messages" that he was determined to get across.

And for Mr Brown no message was more important to get across than to say "not guilty" when it came to the charge of responsibility for the death of our young men and women in battle.

The Prime Minister has long faced accusations – and mounting anger from victims' families – that he failed to fund the Armed Forces adequately.

Just yesterday, he woke to a fresh attack, with former chief of the defence staff General Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank saying that "not fully funding the Army in the way they had asked... undoubtedly cost the lives of soldiers".

From the beginning of the hearing – and countless times

as the day wore on – Mr Brown painted a very different picture,insisting from the start that he had told the Prime Minister

"there should be no sense that there was a financial restraint that prevented us doing what was bestfor the military" and denying he had ever turned down a request for money.

When he was directly challenged on claims that he cut funding for the Armed Forces, he reached the height of Iron Chancellor mode with his insistence that the figures told a different story. Eyelids may have been drooping in the audience, but it was defiant stuff.

By the end of the hearing, like many of his opponents across the despatch box during his decade at the Treasury, the panel had been beaten into submission. There was barely a scratch on Mr Brown, thanks to a mixture of statistical attrition and acknowledgement over the human cost of the war.

In all likelihood, so polarised and concrete are most views on

Iraq that the PM's appearance will have done little to change opinions on Mr Brown's role in the conflict one way or the other. Critics will blame weak questions and evasive answers.

His rivals will seek to make what political capital they can, but Mr Brown will feel the gamble of agreeing to appear before the election has paid off.

It leaves one to wonder what might have been had he been willing to take a bit more of a political risk and act so decisively at other times during his premiership.

Not least because the Prime Minister is facing the prospect of being booted out of office in two months' time. Had he taken the gamble two-and-a-half years ago and called a snap election while his political capital was on the up – as allies like Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary and Normanton MP advised him to do – he could now be barely half way through a full term in office.

Instead, his naturally cautious political instinct may mean that Gordon Brown is spending his final weeks in Downing Street.

Freed of the strain of having the Iraq inquiry hanging over him this weekend, he may once again be asking himself "What if...?"

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