I will seek to broaden the centre ground - Brown

London: Gordon Brown returns to the political frontline. If he feels like he has hardly been away, that is because he has not.

No Caribbean holiday for three weeks. No yachts. No pop star hospitality. The Prime Minister managed four hours in Dorset with his wife and two young sons before rushing back to London to handle the foot-and-mouth outbreak.

For the rest of the summer, he split his time between his new Downing Street home and his Scottish base in Queensferry. He used the August "holiday" to think about how he would cash in on his extended honeymoon period.

Brown is seriously considering an October election and will this week meet his trusted advisers to assess whether it is time to go to the country.

Having written most of his first conference address as Prime Minister, he will deliver it to an exultant party later this month in Bournemouth. He has brought the speech forward to the Monday of conference - a move that has, in the fevered "will-he won't he" atmosphere, been seen as a sign that he may call the election that day.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, he gave the impression of a man who had read the political runes and liked what he saw.

Serious figure

The long, wet summer has seen David Cameron buffeted by a series of mistakes, a run of poor polls and suffering from comparisons with the serious figure at No 10 who has made the political weather work for him.

Speaking in his Downing Street office, Brown seizes on the Tory leader's latest forays into "populist" areas such as immigration, tax and crime and offers his own contrast.

"When the heat is on, political parties can reach for their own comfort zones and territories, to appease a particular faction this way or that," he says. "But that's not modern politics. Modern politics is about reaching out, always trying to go beyond your traditional base.

"I see British politics as us always seeking to unite and to be part of an enlarged centre ground. And us reaching out to those who might not be thought of as our supporters or identified with us."

"We've had not just an MP [Tory defector Quentin Davies] but other people saying there is a better way of doing politics in this country," he points out.

Central to his plan of neutering the Tories is a strategy to crowd them out of the so-called middle ground. "What the Conservatives as an organised political party do and the decisions they make are a matter for them. What I will continue to do is seek to broaden the centre ground and enlarge it, then together we can start to make a difference."

Acting decisively

Challenges have come from everywhere to test Brown. The failed bombings in London and Glasgow; the floods; and foot and mouth. Then, in the last fortnight, the liquidity crisis in the debt market.

None of them has rattled him and he says he has learnt from them that you "have to act decisively and quickly". His wife and children were left with their buckets and spades on the beach as a result.

Aides talk about relations with Nicolas Sarkozy, the new French president, and how the two men "get more done in 10 minutes than Blair and Chirac did in 10 years".

Asked about Iraq, he reiterates that there will be no early withdrawal from Basra. "There is no timetable for exit... We have obligations both to the government of Iraq and the international community."

During his "coronation" period in June, Brown repeatedly said he would not be calling an election when he became prime minister. When asked if that was still the case, he just laughs. A lot of his supporters think Labour can be laughing all the way to an increased majority if their leader strikes now.