Gordon Brown by James Macintyre review – a very different kind of politician

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For a while, during the 13 years when Gordon Brown was at the apex of British politics, it became fashionable, and then a cliche, to depict him as a Shakespearean protagonist. He was the Scot who would be king, consumed by vaulting ambition for the throne, or else the powerful man of action, devoured by envy of his onetime friend. But in an illuminating new biography by the political journalist James Macintyre, Brown emerges as something closer to the hero of a Victorian novel: a man who leads an epic life shaped by early misfortune and later tragedy, driven onward by a moral purpose that burns to the very end.

His is a compelling story. Bill Clinton was once described as the most psychologically complex occupant of the Oval Office since Richard Nixon; the same is surely true if you substitute Brown, Downing Street and Winston Churchill. Macintyre hails him as a “titan”, brimming with both intellectual firepower and the urge, rooted in Christian faith, to do good. (When the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was asked to identify who in the current era most closely incarnates the values of the pastor and legendary anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he answered: “Gordon Brown.”) But Macintyre also describes his subject as “famously flawed”, with a volcanic temper, a talent for grudges – he stops speaking to Robin Cook and can barely remember why – a tendency towards “needless suspicion towards his perceived opponents” and a willingness to rely on a phalanx of “sometimes thuggish spin doctors”, expert in the blackest arts.

In other words, Brown defies the easy categorisation that both the politics and media of the age demands. He is simultaneously possessed of an intellect of “astonishingly high quality”, according to Tony Blair, and yet capable, when making dinner at home for the woman who would become his wife, of inadvertently placing a duvet cover on the table instead of a tablecloth. He is a distinguished scholar of history, yet so fixated on the latest headlines that staff took to hiding the newspapers and switching off the TV sets. He was the “big clunking fist” – Blair again, though oddly the phrase doesn’t appear in this book – who repeatedly showed a gentle empathy to friends and colleagues at times of loss and who, with no publicity, volunteered at a hospice during what was meant to be a rare prime ministerial holiday.

He was indeed filled with personal ambition, yet had no interest in the trappings of office or the cash he could have made on leaving it. On the contrary, he insisted on paying his own way, even picking up the bill for decoration work done at Downing Street, which landed him with “considerable debt as a result”. He has refused to take his prime ministerial pension. Compare this image to that of Peter Mandelson ‑ the man Brown brought back from the political dead, only for him to allegedly betray government secrets to a billionaire who had apparently given him money in the past.

He is shy, alternating on camera between only two modes: dour and awkward. (Public performance was not made easier by the teenage rugby injury which led him to spend much of 1968 in a hospital bed, lying in the darkness, and which resulted in permanent blindness in one eye and impaired vision in the other.) Yet in private he can be warm and funny: Brown would do a bit that involved him impersonating himself, mocking the gulf between his own “mechanical style” and the oratory of Barack Obama. Macintyre reports two episodes of depression – the second following the election defeat of 2010, the first prompted by the death of his baby daughter, Jennifer, at just 10 days old – and yet at age 75 Brown keeps going, still rising at dawn every day to work, work, work.

He was famously indecisive, his premiership blighted by weeks of dithering over whether to call an early election soon after succeeding Blair, and famously decisive, acting to address the financial crash of 2008 when his fellow world leaders were flailing. In one memorable scene, the leaders of the G20 nations gather for crisis talks. A panicked Nicolas Sarkozy says, “Look around the table … compared to our predecessors, we are nothing. Let’s just be honest: in this room no one has a plan.” Obama taps the microphone, leans forward and says, “Gordon’s got a plan.” And so he did, ordering the recapitalisation of the banks, a move that prevented the collapse of the global financial system and saved the world economy from plunging into depression.

Macintyre is upfront that he is sympathetic to, indeed admiring of, his subject and that he has had Brown’s co-operation on the book. But he does give Brown’s former antagonists, inside and outside Labour, their say. He speaks to the Blairites, including Blair himself, and to David Cameron, Michael Gove and Nick Clegg, quoting his sources on the record and at length. With Macintyre, Blair is far more forgiving towards his former chancellor than he was in his own memoir – where he wrote of Brown: “Analytical intelligence, absolutely. Emotional intelligence, zero.” Perhaps time has mellowed him, for he is at pains to be only generous towards the man who went from office spouse to daily headache, even insisting that he had no problem with Brown’s ambition for the top job: “Why shouldn’t he have it?”

There are, inevitably, many pages dedicated to dissecting the supposed pact agreed between Blair and Brown in 1994, when Brown did not contest the Labour leadership, thereby allowing Blair a clear run. Even after exhaustive examination, there is no definitive verdict on what exactly happened between the two. Did Blair promise to step down after 10 years as Labour leader or only after 10 years as PM – or were these pledges that, given the uncertainty of politics, could never realistically be made? For all his admiration of Brown, Macintyre concludes that things worked out for the best: “Blair as front man and Brown as chancellor was almost certainly the right result in the end.” Brown would remain angry, though, gnawing his fingers down to the quick whenever Blair spoke in cabinet meetings. (There is, surely, a John and Paul style account yet to be written of the Brown-Blair relationship, with its Lennon-McCartneyesque arc of intense male friendship, rivalry, eventual estrangement – and ground-shifting productivity.)

The effect of airing these details, like quoting Brown’s onetime opponents, is to encourage the reader to acknowledge Brown’s flaws while seeing how vastly outweighed they are by the rest of his record. To read now of his achievements, as a Labour government struggles for direction and coherence, is a bittersweet experience. Brown halved the number of children living in poverty. The chances of young people finding a job rose by 20%. His creation and funding of Sure Start centres transformed lives: a 2024 study found that children from low-income families who lived near a centre performed up to three grades better in their GCSEs than those who lived further away. The New Labour government was the most redistributive of the entire postwar era, Macintyre writes, thanks to a combination of the minimum wage, tax credits, pension changes and vastly increased spending on the NHS. As one former adviser notes, “It’s very important that Labour people don’t assume that action on poverty happens automatically because their lot is in power: last time it happened because Labour had a chancellor who was hell-bent that it should.”

Granting independence to the Bank of England gave the British economy a new stability; Brown’s determination to cancel the debts of the poorest nations led to $100bn being written off, releasing cash for schools, clinics and clean water for some of the neediest people on the planet. True, his regulation of the high-rollers in the City was too light. True, he did not resign over the invasion of Iraq. True, British entry into the euro, which Brown opposed, might have made Brexit impossible, though failure could have had the opposite effect. What is hard fact is that Brown’s record of accomplishment is immense – and rare. It makes him one of the towering figures of recent British history.

And, as Macintyre notes in the closing chapters, Brown is not done. Whether acting as a UN education envoy, ensuring schooling in Lebanon for millions of child refugees from Syria, or persuading Amazon to hand over unused goods to fill his innovative “multibank” – “a food bank, clothes bank, toiletries bank, bedding bank, baby bank, hygiene bank and furniture bank all rolled into one” – Brown is doing more good as an ex-PM than plenty of his successors managed in the job.

Thanks to a rightwing press that often seemed to loathe him it was Brown’s demons that were, during his years in government, most often presented to the British public. Only intermittently was a glimpse offered of the stronger, better angels of his nature. This diligent book seeks to redress that balance, to tell the story of a life packed with drama, tragedy and, above all, service.

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