Gordon Brown is in Washington today to touch the hem of Barack Obama's cloak. Like the bleeding woman healed by Jesus, so the man haemorrhaging political support hopes to be saved by this modern Messiah.

Already, Downing Street aides are describing the visit as a make-or-break moment, the best chance to rekindle Labour's hopes of winning the next election. The Prime Minister is presenting himself and the President as the leaders of a global alliance against the forces of conservatism, hoping that some of the glamour will brush off on to him.

Privately, though, even Mr Brown's own aides admit there is a danger that the trip will simply reinforce his weaknesses - that he will look wooden next to the more charismatic man, and that his address to Congress will highlight his inability to communicate with the voters at home. As Alain de Botton writes in his book The Art of Travel, it is impossible to escape reality by going abroad because, as he realised on one trip: “I had inadvertently brought myself with me.”

Unlike Tony Blair, Mr Brown would quite like to be a poodle to the President - if that meant he could lap up some of his popularity. He may in fact end up looking like a terrier yapping at the heels of the more powerful man. Although No10 likes to say that Britain and America are “on the same page” when it comes to tackling the recession, the size of the print is rather different - Mr Brown's fiscal stimulus is £20 billion so far compared with Mr Obama's $787 billion. When the Prime Minister talks of brokering a “grand bargain” under which Europe would stump up more cash and America relinquish protectionism, he risks looking either irritating - or, worse, irrelevant.

The real danger for Mr Brown is that he is seen to be grandstanding abroad while people here are losing their jobs and homes. It is all very well talking about reform of the international financial institutions - but most voters are more worried about their mortgages, their children's schools and how they are going to pay their bills.

For some time now, Downing Street advisers have been complaining about Mr Brown's inability to translate “macro” politics into “micro” realities. There is now a growing sense of frustration among some Cabinet ministers and strategists that the Prime Minister is keener to focus on what they call the “vision thing” than on more immediate decisions about the bank insurance scheme or the Private Finance Initiative or the Royal Mail. At the weekend Mr Brown called for a “global new deal” on the recession - but yesterday it emerged that the Government's £10 billion business lending guarantee scheme, which could actually save jobs, is weeks behind schedule. Ministers are all over the place over bank bonuses and Fred the Shred's pension because there is no clear line from the top.

During one recent conference call involving Ed Balls and Lord Mandelson (Mr Brown's new core team who have regular strategy meetings) the Prime Minister was pressed repeatedly to deal with a list of specific issues but kept turning the conversation to his plan to create a new economic world order. “He's happiest talking about global financial institutions; that's where he's comfortable. But people want concrete answers to the problems they're facing right now,” says one strategist. “It's back to the dither thing.” Indeed, it did not take a new global financial framework to force America, France and Germany to impose a cap on bank bonuses - they did it, while the Government in this country did not.

In Washington this week, and at the G20 summit in London next month, Mr Brown will press his case for reform of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Financial Stability Forum. He will also call for a “low-carbon recovery” that spreads wealth more fairly around the world by honouring the millennium development goals.

There is no doubt merit in what he says. But such calls ring hollow if the Prime Minister continues to refuse to admit that he made mistakes himself, and that there were failures in the regulatory framework that he set up in this country. And when Mr Brown cannot even get agreement around his own Cabinet table it is hard to see him successfully masterminding a plan involving the entire world.

At times the whole blueprint sounds rather utopian - a kind of banking version of Esperanto, a nice idea in theory but of little practical use. A Downing Street briefing paper on the London summit calls for “visionary leaders” to act as one. “This crisis is an opportunity,” it says. “The world's leading economies can come together and lay the foundations not just for a sustainable economic recovery, but also for a genuinely new era of international economic partnership, a global deal, in which all countries have a part to play and all will see the benefits.” That's not quite how it looks down at Jobcentre Plus.

There is an idealism to the Prime Minister's long-held desire for reform that is in some ways admirable. His proposals are driven by noble instincts. But there was an idealism about Mr Blair's decision to send British troops to war in Iraq. There is a parallel between the two leaders' missionary zeal. The former Prime Minister wanted to spread democracy around the world to prevent another September 11; the current one wants to create a new form of global government to prevent a repeat of the credit crunch. Indeed, Mr Brown could credibly argue that the kaleidoscope has been shaken by recent events and that the rules of the game have changed as a result of the banking crisis.

He may be right but, as his predecessor discovered, voters are more interested in Real Help Now. That is, in fact, the slogan the Government has plastered all over its websites at the moment. There are some around Mr Brown who wish he would take it more keenly to heart.

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