The one time I met Gordon Brown would have been in about 2008, at an event honouring civil servants. By coincidence, I would soon become a civil servant myself, but I was covering this event, tape recorder and notepad in hand, as a journalist. Nevertheless, as then UK prime minister Brown passed down a line of actual civil servants he shook hand after hand, repeating variations of one of his stock phrases – “thank you for all you do”; “thanks for your work for our country”– until he came to me, duly pumped my (unproffered) hand and thanked me for all I did.
All I was doing that night was securing some quotes to file a few hundred banal words for an obscure magazine, but I appreciated the intensity with which I had been mistakenly thanked.
The intensity which marked so much of Brown’s brand of politics sometimes seemed out of time in the 1990s and 2000s, an era of highly professionalised and polished presentation. Though Brown was himself an advocate of the professionalisation that marked the “New Labour” project and of the modernisation of the British economy (including in relation to financial services, more of which later), he often seemed lifted straight from the Victorian age. One can imagine his face etched on a daguerreotype, carved in moral purpose over a starched collar.
And it is that seriousness, so often unfashionable and limiting during his premiership, which has seen his stock rise steadily out of office; to the point where, as James McIntyre says in his new biography, Power with Purpose, Brown is probably the “most respected of the eight currently living former prime ministers”
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Given that list includes Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, one may question how impressive an achievement it is to come out on top; the shallowness and venality of what came after Brown set his intellectual and moral seriousness in such stark relief.
Much of Brown’s early life was marked with duty and expectation: the son of a Presbyterian minister, he was so academically gifted that he was part of an experimental programme that saw him arrive at Edinburgh University at the age of 16. The fusion of Calvinist seriousness with social conscience (his father was still organising collections for Christian Aid in his 80s) then met 1960s radicalism as Brown got involved in student politics, and not in a casual way. He found himself elected rector of Edinburgh University, an office previously held by Gladstone, Lloyd George and Churchill, at just 21.
Of course, one man’s moral duty to lead is another man’s ruthless ambition, and Brown clearly had both. McIntyre’s book tends heavily to the former depiction, describing the pivotal decision to step aside to let Tony Blair run for the Labour leadership after John Smith’s untimely death, as “an act of self-sacrifice” by his subject. Others have characterised it differently, and Brown clearly never lost a sense of grievance over both that decision and the perceived breaking by Blair of a promise to step down in 2004.
The sheer volume of attention that has been paid to that relationship was, in retrospect, over the top, ranging from multiple books, TV series (including a very recent one) and even plays and TV movies. To Macintyre’s credit and this reader’s relief, he does not labour (no pun intended) this part of the narrative, but the comparison with Blair is unavoidable. If such a comparison was to Blair’s advantage when they were active politicians, it is to Brown’s now.
In retirement, Brown has been rooted in Fife, where he grew up and which he represented in Parliament, and in the things that have always animated him, especially poverty alleviation and international aid. He has pioneered an extended form of food bank known as “multi-banks”, offering those in need essentials beyond food. His international travel is focused on his work as an envoy for both the UN and WHO rather than paid speaking trips or corporate gigs. In the weeks since this book was published, Brown has even been ahead of the world’s media in hunting out details of flights being used by Jeffrey Epstein to traffic girls through the UK.
Unusually for a retired head of government, his activism has become more urgent and his willingness to speak in clear moral terms more pointed. Stating all this is to draw a comparison between the post premierships of Brown and Blair, which is so stark that it hardly needs pointed out.
This book, perhaps out of grateful politesse to Blair, who provided quotes to the author, does not dwell long on the contrast. But it is glaring nonetheless. Last month, Brown excoriated the Trump administration over the bombing of schoolgirls at Minab in Iran. In January, Blair paid tribute to Trump’s “leadership” in Gaza, singling out the architects of the subsequent war in Iran, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, for their “outstanding” work.
If this book occasionally reads as an apologia for Brown, that is not necessarily a bad thing. That he used to be mocked by Tories for his rote listing of his achievements in office, from child poverty reduction to NHS spending and leading the saving of the world financial system (something Barack Obama consistently credited him with) highlights their own decade and a half of chaos afterwards.
In a political scene so defined by venality and idiocy, to read of leadership, not all that long ago, motivated by moral and intellectual seriousness, is to wonder: what the hell happened?
Matthew O’Toole is an SDLP MLA and leader of the Opposition in the Northern Ireland Assembly
