What if Brown had stood in 1992

Quick AH question to start an interesting discussion. What if following Neil Kinnock's resignation Gordon Brown had stood against John Smith for party leadership, as Tony Blair suggested and many Labour members speculated? What would have been the outcome and could Brown have been PM in 1997?
 
Possibly Brown could have won, but Smith was almost a foregone conclusion in 1992.

Assuming Brown defeats Smith, given the Tory travails he goes on to win in 1992 but he doesn't capture the public imagination to anywhere near the extent that Blair did in the OTL, and although he does create something akin to New Labour it is a more cosmetic branding than in the OTL.

Labour majority of about 70. Portillo holds his seat and becomes opposition leader. Blair is Foreign Secretary and harbours ambitions for the premiership which cause tensions between him and Brown. Robin Cook is Chancellor and Margaret Beckett Home Secretary and Deputy PM.

Labour wins again in 2001 but only by 15-20 seats. Darling becomes Chancellor. Blair is demoted to Environment to make way for Cook and, furious, finds an excuse to resign the following year. A fractious party becomes divided between supporters of Brown and Blair. After a disastrous result in the 2004 Euro elections and dreadful opinion polls for Brown, he resigns rather than lead Labour to a seemingly inevitable defeat in 2006. Blair defeats Darling for the leadership and reverses the opinion poll decline to some extent and calls an early election to capitalise.

The 2005 election produces a hung parliament with Labour the largest party by almost 50 seats. Blair and Kennedy form a coalition, with the withdrawal of troops from Iraq one of Kennedy's main demands.

David Cameron is elected leader of the opposition. After five years of increasingly fractious Lab/Lib coalition which does not suit Blair's temperament, the Conservatives win a narrow majority in the 2010 election.

Blair resigns from the leadership and from Parliament, and in a satisfying result for his old rival Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, who promises a break with the recent past becomes Labour leader.
 
Brown is not going to defeat Smith. And as such, he would not run - so even speculating on what a defeated Brown in '92 would mean for subsequent events is totally moot. It's just not going to happen. The idea that '92 was Brown's chance and he somehow bottled it was just a piece of self-vindicating invention by the Blairites in '94 to justify Brown's exclusion from the leadership. In reality, Smith would have just whupped him slightly less convincingly than he did Bryan Gould IOTL; probably something in the region of about 70/75 to 20/15 in the electoral college, assuming Gould still runs.

For Brown to be elected in '92, you would have to remove Smith by natural causes at some point in the '87 Parliament. I don't want to sound crass or macabre here, but that would have been Brown's easiest route to an early leadership. For Brown's leadership ambitions, Smith's health failed at the wrong side of the '92 election.
 
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