Andy Beckett · ‘We used to have fun’: Gordon Brown Reconsidered

In August​ 2007, two months into Gordon Brown’s premiership, two-thirds of voters accredited of his efficiency: one of many highest charges of satisfaction for any prime minister during the last twenty years. Labour was nicely forward of the Conservatives within the polls. The Tory chief, David Cameron, was in a troublesome section, not a contemporary determine after a yr and a half in cost, and going through rising inner opposition to his liberalisation technique. Brown, lengthy regarded at Westminster and by the media as a ruthless operator, was extensively anticipated to name a common election to take benefit.

The following month, with that expectation even stronger, I ran right into a pro-Labour political journalist at a London bus cease. He had simply come again from the social gathering’s annual convention, and his ordinary low-key method was changed by one thing approaching pleasure. Labour folks at convention had insisted an election was coming, he stated, they usually anticipated to win. They additionally anticipated this outcome to immediate a Tory cut up – liberal Cameroons on one aspect, reactionary Conservatives on the opposite – which might lengthen Labour’s time in workplace even additional. The social gathering had already been in energy for a decade, thanks largely to Brown’s prolonged, usually acclaimed tenure as chancellor, and it appeared completely potential that this dominance would proceed. As had been the case throughout stretches of the Nineteen Forties, Sixties and Nineteen Seventies, centre-left authorities appeared to be changing into Britain’s pure state.

Things didn’t work out like that. Brown determined to not name an election and just a few weeks later his approval scores collapsed and by no means absolutely recovered. His premiership lasted lower than three years. Rather than a continuation of Britain’s run of comparatively lengthy and steady governments for the reason that Eighties, Brown’s administration was the beginning of one thing else: a interval when prime ministers shortly and persistently went from being seen as nationwide saviours to being hated. It’s a interval we’re nonetheless in.

At the 2010 election, Labour obtained one in every of its worst vote shares for the reason that Second World War. For 4 years after this humiliating defeat, Brown largely retreated from public life, ‘very down and down on himself’, based on an outdated buddy quoted by James Macintyre on this well-sourced biography. He spent most of this era at dwelling, a indifferent Victorian home in North Queensferry, a village trying throughout the darkish waters of the Firth of Forth in direction of Edinburgh, the place his political profession had begun. He stated and wrote little for public consumption concerning the causes his administration had failed, after seeming to start out so nicely. Journalists and voters turned their consideration to the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition, whereas his personal social gathering moved away from Brownite politics, underneath a brand new, a lot youthful and fewer brooding chief, Ed Miliband. Brown’s premiership was left as a little bit of a thriller: an instance of formidable expertise, expertise and laborious work one way or the other not being sufficient; and of a politician extremely profitable at decreasing poverty however failing to attach with lots of the beneficiaries of his insurance policies. Like Barack Obama, one other centre-left chief with a seductively wealthy voice and intensive powers of oratory, in workplace Brown was a disappointment to lots of his admirers. In 2015 he retired from Parliament.

Since then, regardless of his authorities’s gray, opaque high quality, his status has progressively however considerably recovered. By 2024, Macintyre writes, ‘the polling company YouGov reported … that Brown was the most popular of all [living] Labour politicians … above, for example, Andy Burnham … Ed Miliband, Tony Blair and Keir Starmer.’ According to Macintyre, a political journalist of lengthy expertise, he’s ‘also probably the most respected of the eight currently living former prime ministers’. It’s not all that troublesome to come back prime in a recognition league desk that features Liz Truss, Boris Johnson, the one barely much less discredited Cameron and the nonetheless intensely divisive Blair, Brown’s former shut comrade after which bitter rival. Yet, on the age of 75, Brown has regained a lot of the credibility and ethical authority, even mystique, he constructed up throughout his relentless rise by way of Labour politics from the early Nineteen Seventies. Some of this restoration is a matter of non-public integrity. While many Westminster politicians discover irresistible the alternatives supplied to them by calculating wealthy folks, an unnamed Labour MP tells the writer that ‘I have never met anyone less interested in money than Gordon Brown.’ Macintyre says that he ‘accepted no gifts while in office, declined his prime ministerial pension, paid his own way with suits, spectacles and decorating through his time in Downing Street and left office in considerable debt as a result’. It’s not the one time within the guide that Starmer’s premiership, which started with many individuals hoping he could be a determine of Brown-like probity, suffers by comparability.

Since the mid-2010s, Brown has additionally turn out to be a distinguished campaigner: in opposition to Scottish independence, the two-child profit cap and the persevering with official silence round a lot of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal; for the restoration of pensioners’ winter gas allowance, international enhancements in well being and schooling, and nearer co-operation between governments to cope with worldwide crises. You don’t should agree with all of his causes, or consider they’re sensible, to simply accept that he has turn out to be a big public determine once more, making extensively reported speeches, writing energetically researched and argued stories and articles, and arm-twisting Starmer’s ministers. Unlike many veterans of New Labour, one of the unrepentant cohorts in British politics, he appears to have turn out to be extra open-minded. Once one in every of Westminster’s most famed bearers of grudges, he now generally takes half in respectful on-line discussions with former enemies reminiscent of John McDonnell, who stood in opposition to him for the Labour management in 2007.

This comparatively brief biography devotes 4 chapters to Brown’s life after Downing Street. Here, as all through the guide, the tone is often crucial however basically admiring. ‘During his ten years as chancellor and his three as prime minister,’ Macintyre writes, ‘he could be difficult, obstructive and needlessly suspicious … But Brown … pursued power for a purpose’ and is ‘more than due a reappraisal … Talking to people away from Westminster, there appears to be a thirst for the kind of substance that Brown represents.’ New Labour sources dominate the textual content, and are incessantly quoted at size, whereas those that have perceptively criticised Brown from the Labour left, reminiscent of McDonnell, barely characteristic. Brown’s former adviser, minister and key ally Ed Balls seems consistently, both giving detailed, generally fascinating however largely unchallenged accounts of his outdated boss’s coverage selections, battles with Blair and extra ambiguous Westminster manoeuvres, or offering summaries of Brown’s distinctive qualities that would come from a celebration political broadcast:

The factor which is distinctive about Gordon was that he didn’t see being a politician … as an finish in itself, [but] as a possibility to do issues in authorities on the highest stage, issues which had been his objective for all his life … [such as] tackling poverty, or investing within the NHS or being powerful with the general public funds …

Even Blair, who, in addition to falling out with Brown in authorities, has moved a protracted approach to his proper since then, contributes a half-page paean to Brown’s ‘extraordinary intellect’ and data of Labour and Westminster politics. ‘I learned an enormous amount from him,’ Blair says, together with ‘how to make a [party] conference speech’. Later within the guide, he provides: ‘We used to have fun together. I mean, Gordon, he has got his very serious side, but he can be immensely entertaining company.’

Brown can also be quoted a number of occasions, however fortuitously his statements are much less upbeat and extra revealing than these of his former comrades. About his temporary competitors with Blair for the Labour management after John Smith died immediately in 1994, Brown says with uncooked terseness: ‘Well, [Blair] was entitled to run of course if he wanted to, but … he essentially tried to gazump me.’ The story of how Blair got here to switch Brown as Smith’s successor, after which made Brown wait for much longer than he needed or anticipated to turn out to be prime minister, has been instructed many occasions, and Macintyre’s model, whereas clear and balanced, provides little. It additionally misses an opportunity to replicate on how a lot British politics has modified since one Labour prodigy might promise one other that, in Brown’s phrases, he ‘would give me control of economic and social policy and would stand down during a second term’. In at this time’s extra economically troubled and risky nation, the ambitions of chancellors are extra modest, and the lifespans of governments and prime ministers loads shorter.

In some methods Brown used the slower, extra predictable tempo of politics in the course of the Nineteen Nineties and 2000s nicely. More of a planner and an implementer than an improviser, he oversaw financial development per capita between 1997 and 2010 which exceeded that of France, Germany and the United States – and much exceeds Britain’s feeble development charge since then. He nearly halved the variety of kids residing in poverty, and after his administration the aged have been not poorer on common than different Britons. He pushed by way of his personal most popular anti-poverty measures, reminiscent of tax credit for the low-paid, and inspired civil servants to give you their very own. There is a good quote right here from an official within the Department for Work and Pensions: ‘If you want to get Gordon to sign off on something it’s a good suggestion to stay a chart on the entrance displaying the large achieve going to the poorest 10 per cent.’

Brown wasn’t at all times eager for the egalitarian penalties of his insurance policies to be marketed. Like Blair and New Labour usually, he feared each the right-wing press and the tough assumptions of many citizens that these papers helped kind and maintain. While Macintyre says that Brown is an ‘admirer’ of the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, he didn’t appear to consider, even when he was arguably essentially the most highly effective particular person in Britain within the late Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s, steering Labour’s home coverage, that the ‘common sense’ which underlay public opinion and political discourse might be challenged and altered. In 1999 Brown was livid with the journalist Robert Peston for describing that yr’s Budget as ‘seriously redistributive’ within the Financial Times. ‘Why did you write that?’ he requested Peston. ‘It was profoundly unhelpful.’ This anxious refusal to make the case for a extra equal nation meant that when Labour misplaced energy, lots of its most progressive reforms might be reversed comparatively simply, as a result of not sufficient voters understood or supported their rationale. Earlier Labour governments, reminiscent of Clement Attlee’s within the late Nineteen Forties, had not made that mistake, selling tasks reminiscent of large-scale council home constructing and the brand new NHS so successfully that their Conservative successors have been pressured to proceed with them. According to Macintyre and lots of of his sources, Brown has an encyclopedic data of Labour historical past. But in authorities a few of its most necessary classes appeared to elude him.

As chancellor, a deadly conservatism additionally formed his strategy to Britain’s outsized and destabilising monetary companies trade. In opposition, he had spent years wooing the City of London in what journalists referred to as the ‘prawn cocktail offensive’, which Macintyre doesn’t point out. One motivation was to steer bankers {that a} Labour authorities could be smart, within the City’s self-interested phrases, which basically meant it wouldn’t impose new rules on the banks’ ever riskier actions. Brown thought the monetary sector was essential to financial development, and to the additional tax income New Labour would wish to cut back poverty and restore public companies, run down by nearly twenty years of Tory rule. Yet combined in with this pragmatic appeasement of the City was an admiration, which solely grew as soon as Brown was in authorities. In a typical speech to a City viewers in June 2002, he thanked his viewers for permitting London to take care of

its place among the many world’s prime monetary centres … The significance that the City attaches to integrity and the best requirements within the provision of economic companies is [one of] the enduring means [of achieving this position] … As the world economic system has opened up, you’ve gotten succeeded not by sheltering your share of a small protected nationwide market however by striving for a larger and larger share of the rising international market … You have embraced technological innovation … reworked the talents of your workforces … What you, because the City of London, have achieved for monetary companies we, as a authorities, now aspire to attain for the entire economic system.

Five years later, the monetary disaster started. Rather than being a mannequin for the remainder of the economic system, the City’s practices had plunged it into recession, and ruined the federal government’s funds and New Labour’s status for profitable financial administration. Luck is necessary in politics, and Brown, who had not too long ago, lastly, turn out to be prime minister, took the blame quite than Blair, who was much more of an fanatic for evenly regulated capitalism however had conveniently left the Commons by the point the disaster began. Brown then performed a central function within the worldwide effort that prevented the disaster changing into a world meltdown. Macintyre makes a lot of this demonstration of Brown’s brainpower and summitry abilities – it additionally supplied a uncommon occasion of efficient political improvisation on his half. Less astutely, Brown introduced Peter Mandelson again into the cupboard, regardless of their risky relationship and Mandelon’s historical past of non-public scandals. As political correspondent for the New Statesman, Macintyre was one of many facilitators of this ‘imaginative move’, he tells us, a task that appears much less spectacular now, with the allegations that Mandelson leaked necessary Brown authorities materials to Epstein, than it maybe did when this guide went to press.

Macintyre​ doesn’t contemplate whether or not the monetary disaster was additionally a home political alternative which Brown failed to understand. Had he punished, or simply loudly criticised, a few of the responsible bankers – nevertheless cynically, given his earlier enthusiasm – he might need saved his premiership. Instead, in April 2009, he made a single, coded reference in a speech to the best way the disaster had discredited free-market capitalism – ‘the Washington consensus is over’ – which solely these fluent within the jargon of globalisation might perceive. The public anger about greed within the City and different establishments that had been profiteering recklessly and at enormous social price for 1 / 4 of a century, for the reason that free-market reforms of Margaret Thatcher, remained unaddressed, because it nonetheless is – with the fleeting exceptions of temporary forays in the course of the Labour leaderships of Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn. As the not too long ago elected Green MP for Gorton and Denton, Hannah Spencer, put it in her victory speech, ‘Instead of working for a nice life, we’re working to line the pockets of billionaires.’ Labour misplaced this protected seat, because it misplaced many underneath Brown, partly as a result of, not like the Greens now, it might not or couldn’t make a left-wing populist case for an financial reset.

Why might somebody as intelligent, intellectually curious and socially aware as Brown not see that British capitalism wanted reform? Again, the guide avoids the problem. But maybe one a part of the reply is that there’s no proof right here of Brown participating with left-wing thinkers, Gramsci apart. As is common in research of Brown, the guide mentions that in 1975, as a 24-year-old, he edited a group of socialist essays referred to as The Red Paper on Scotland. There, he wrote that it had turn out to be ‘increasingly impossible to manage the economy both for private profit and the needs of society as a whole’ and that the one manner out of this dilemma was ‘a massive and irreversible shift of power to working people’ and ‘free universal welfare services controlled by the people who use them’. The first resolution was additionally proposed by Tony Benn in the course of the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties, and the second by Corbyn and McDonnell throughout their temporary ascendancy within the 2010s.

However, Macintyre exhibits that Brown’s radical section didn’t final lengthy. By the late Nineteen Seventies, he had turn out to be a defender of the comparatively right-wing Labour chancellor Denis Healey – a steamroller of an orator and a quick learner in a disaster, who might be seen as a Brown function mannequin. As a precocious new MP in the course of the 1984-85 miners’ strike, Brown was unimpressed by the management of the left-wing veteran Arthur Scargill – as a result of Scargill ‘turned the dispute into a political strike personalised around himself’ – but usually additionally gave the strikers sensible assist. His constituency, Dunfermline East, was in an outdated mining space, and staff from putting pits elsewhere in Fife nonetheless lived there. ‘There were ten strike centres locally,’ Brown instructed Macintyre, ‘and most Fridays I visited them to give whatever financial help I could. There was grinding hardship such that I had never seen before.’

This is an attention-grabbing admission, on condition that Brown had grown up in Fife surrounded by industrial decline and unemployment, because the native mines and linoleum factories closed in the course of the Sixties. Friends he made at college needed to transfer to England so their fathers might search for new jobs. Brown’s personal father, a Church of Scotland minister and an enormous affect on him, had additionally labored with poor households in Glasgow. The impression this biography offers of Brown’s lifelong preoccupation with poverty is that it has at all times been extra ethical than political. His father, regardless of his robust social conscience, was non-public about his personal politics. This unideological upbringing maybe begins to clarify why Brown has achieved a lot as a legislator and campaigner in opposition to deprivation, and but has executed comparatively little to change the financial buildings and forces that produce poverty within the first place. In Britain as in different starkly unequal nations, standing up for the economic system’s losers with eloquence and objective could make you a revered determine. The much less standard political activity is taking up the winners.