It's one thing for Brown to try to show his "human" side, but we don't really expect our rulers to be losers. It's quite another to fail completely to announce the full-scale retreat that his current circumstances (slaughtered in the local elections) require.
Great generals know when they're beaten and get the hell out to fight another day. Moderate ones, who can't quite come to terms with the fact they've lost, withdraw piecemeal and waste their diminished resources on engagements they can't win.
Which is exactly what Brown is doing.
The defining moment of his premiership used to be the election that never was. Now it's the abolition of the 10p tax band.
Yet even after apparently giving way on this, he still hasn't produced any concrete proposals as to how he's going to mend things. Because he doesn't really want to give way and is hoping that the problem will go away, which it won't.
The upshot is that the media that don't feel obliged to be polite to him (and the BBC's genial Andrew Marr was barely that on Sunday) will just hack away.
Even one-time supporter Jackie Ashley observed in The Guardian on Monday that the story now, in the press at least, is the likelihood of a leadership challenge.
She also said that Rupert Murdoch, fabled definer of election results, had switched horses to David Cameron and the Tories, masking his desertion of his old "friend" by pretending it was son James' call now.
But Murdoch's influence on elections is wildly ove-rated, chiefly by the politicians themselves.
His papers, under his guidance, are good at spotting the likely winner and backing it for all they're worth. But the voters don't do what the Sun and The Times say they should.
What the Sun and, across the Street, the Mail are brilliant at doing is getting politicians to do what they want them to do.
So in the week leading up to the local election catastrophe Brown "personally" (or so we were led to believe) vetoed a move to raise prisoners' wages a smidgeon (a petty move designed to shut up the papers) and also let it be known that they wanted cannabis reclassified as a Class B drug, despite the opposition of most of the medical profession and even the police.
This is hardly strong leadership, or indeed leadership of any description. Leaders do what they think is right, not what they think the papers will like.
Brown's only hope is to forget about the papers (as Tony Blair mostly did after his first term) and try to rally his party (who hate the papers anyway).
He can then let them focus on Cameron (and his supposed lack of policies) and new Mayor of London Boris Johnson who, if you believe what you read and hear from his admirers, is a combination of Cicero, Pericles and the late Eric Morecambe.
But to do this he's got to retreat first by offering some substantial recompense to former 10p band taxpayers before the forthcoming Crewe by-election, scrap the imminent fuel tax rises and forget all about 42 days detention for terrorist suspects (his party hates this even though many voters probably don't give a toss).
Is Brown capable of betting the ranch on a win treble or will he hedge his bets, as usual?
If it's the latter, as I suspect, he could still be gone by the summer holidays.