I bet the real Gordon Brown has, this week, been more concerned about the Burmese than about “bin bullies”, as the Tories call them. No 10 appears to have briefed various newspapers that “bin taxes” are to be, er, binned, because voters didn't like the idea. Which means all of us will pay more council tax as landfill fines increase, subsidising those who refuse to recycle properly or do not bother to fling their excess plastic packaging back at the supermarkets.

So a progressive, green policy joins the rest of the rubbish being chucked out of No 10. No wonder environment ministers are fighting back, and insisting that the moves towards bin taxes are progressing nicely, thank you: pilots on course and all that. Which is a bit like claiming that the Government is on course because it's still releasing initiatives and ten-year plans.

Last week's results showed how clearly it is not. It's a fair bet that more of the voters that Mr Brown lost will care about bin taxes than about Burma. Unlike when the tsunami struck South Asia three years ago, few in the West have a clear image of Burma. We haven't been on holiday there, we have no memories of sun-soaked days in the Irrawaddy delta. Without television images or at least a mental snapshot, we find it hard to care about a place these days.

Not Mr Brown. He will have cared about the villages destroyed, the children dead, the lives and livelihoods devastated. I was surprised at first yesterday to hear that the Prime Minister was hosting a big meeting on fighting poverty in the developing world just two days after he promised to stay in Britain and go around listening to the people. I do hope he doesn't do that; he would only scare them. Poverty and international development are far more Mr Brown's natural terrain.

You almost feel sorry for the man, the irreconcilable advice exploding at him from all quarters: listen more, do more, focus on bread-and-butter issues, “talk the language of relationships and fraternity”, be yourself. Surely that latter one is the answer. It is time for Mr Brown to be his own man again. He is the man who cares about poverty in the developing world, and here; about educating children in Manchester, or Mozambique; about creating a fairer playing field, whether in Britain or overseas.

It is an agenda shared by his wife, Sarah, who hosted a lunch with Carla Sarkozy in aid of the White Ribbon Alliance a few weeks ago. With the opportunity to use Banqueting House to highlight any event she chose, she selected a charity that works to prevent the unnecessary deaths of women in pregnancy or childbirth around the world. The statistics are bleak, with well over half a million maternal deaths each year - that's one a minute, four fifths of which could be prevented at little cost and which often leave behind children and babies whose own life chances are then severely damaged in turn. It is the only Millennium Development Goal to have made no progress at all, Mrs Brown chided in a speech. I don't think the Browns spend their evenings or Sunday mornings discussing bin taxes or petrol prices. Millennium development goals are probably more their milieu than league tables.

And therein lies his problem. Mr Brown is not of the same world as Middle England, and his attempts to join it only make him look fraudulent and weak. But he doesn't belong to such a different world, either. Monday's reports of his television interview on the Andrew Marr show on Sunday were unanimous: he was knackered, done for, weird, they all agreed. So I suppose my expectations were low by the time I managed to watch it on Monday night, but I thought Mr Brown was good. There was real passion there about wasted potential and the need for fairness; he showed grace and a touch of humour.

We don't want to hear about plastic bag taxes or the latest crime initiative from the Prime Minister. His Cabinet can deal with all that. He cannot anyway speak to all the diverse local priorities of a nation that last week voted out a councillor in Manchester because he supported a congestion charge, and a council leader in Barrow-in-Furness because he supported an academy.

Mr Brown should stick to the bigger picture (which is not the same as issuing a pre-list of his priorities for the autumn Queen's Speech, “a plan and a programme for the future”, he called it. Oh no, not that. Stop planning us!). It is fantasy to suggest that he has a year to improve his performance... “And then . . .” Then what? Change the leader in the final straight before a general election? The voters would punish Labour even harder, and quite right too.

No, they are stuck with what they've got, which gives Mr Brown two years to show the country who he really is - show, not lecture us. He should stop striking poses on issues such as 42 days, and offer more clearly his compelling vision about equal opportunity. Let his policies speak for themselves. He may be out of office in two years' time, but what a glorious two years he could have until then. He might as well do it. I don't think his core beliefs and priorities are all that out of tune with the British people's anyway - he is not Michael Foot, this is not 1983 - but at the moment it's hard even to tell what they are.

And there it is: more advice. Which is the last thing Mr Brown needs. He hasn't been a good Prime Minister, but he is still a good man. Even if it's too late to show the country the former, he could demonstrate the latter. And who knows, the country might even like it. Burma may not be too far from Birmingham after all.

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