GORDON BROWN spent last weekend surrounded by his closest friends. Most of them were long dead, but in their company the Chancellor came suddenly alive: Tolstoy, Wordsworth and Orwell, and alongside them Thomas Gray, H. G. Wells, Tennyson and Milton. His best chum of all, Brown declared, was Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the great Scottish writer of the 1930s and the author of Sunset Song, Brown’s favourite novel — a granite prose-poet for the granite Chancellor. A couple of passing French existentialists, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, joined the party. Surrounded by his literary chums, Brown seemed more relaxed than I have ever seen him in public before.

Brown has a genuine love of literature, and the books that he loves speak volumes about him. In many ways, he seems more comfortable with books than with people. I once had an extended conversation with him in the corner of a crowded party when he talked with animation of the modern Scottish writers William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin. Oddly, he did not mention these in his favourite reading at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival. Perhaps one Scottish author is enough. The man, after all, wants to be prime minister, in England.

All politicians proclaim to love literature, but very few really read. For most public figures, books do furnish a career. Brown is different: if he becomes premier, he will be our most profoundly bookish leader since Churchill (although a claim might be made for Harold Macmillan, who could be found rereading Jane Austen on slow days at No 10). Tony Blair describes Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott as his favourite book, and has read the Koran three times. He praises Robert Louis Stevenson and J. R. R. Tolkien, and once cited Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky as a formative influence, which gave him “a love of political biography for the rest of my life”. Even so, he wears his library lightly. Famously (and perhaps apocryphally) he is said to have met Ian McEwan at a party and told him that he had several of his pictures hanging in N o 10.

Margaret Thatcher’s literary interests extended little further than “re-reading” the novels of Frederick Forsyth on holiday. John Major enjoyed Anthony Trollope novels, but in the same bland English way that he liked bicycle clips and warm beer.

Modern politicians routinely trot out prefabricated reading lists as an easy claim to intellectual gravitas. George Bush the elder once described how much he had been impressed by War and Peace, but when challenged to explain why, he conceded that he had been struck by the sheer number of pages rather then anything in them. On the other hand, his Democratic opponent in 1988, Michael Dukakis, was rumoured to have taken Swedish Land-Use Planning on a beach holiday — a book so boring that it came to define his dreary and doomed presidential campaign.

George W. Bush married a librarian, but his relationship with books has not been easy. He once revealed that his favourite was The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and told the American columnist Maureen Dowd that he also liked “reading John La Care, Le Carrier, or however you pronounce his name”. This year, however, he upped the ante by releasing a summer reading list that included Hamlet, Macbeth and The Stranger by Camus. Somehow the idea of Bush curling up with Camus seems about as unlikely as Brown boogying to Arctic Monkeys.

On the whole, one should not judge a politician by his book covers, but in the case of Brown the books are so integral to his personality that browsing his library may be the only way to read the famously inscrutable Chancellor. Brown is not just at home with books, he seems to associate the very notion of “home” with literature.

“I was brought up in a house where books were not just in one room but in every room,” he said recently. “My father seemed to have bought the whole book collection of Scotland.” His book choices are those of a serious-minded, self-driven Presbyterian intellectual, a hardback library for a hard mind: this is a man most at ease with ideas, but touched by Romanticism and a certain existential angst. There is not much humour, little from modern life, much that is proper, Victorian and earnest.

For some, Brown’s booklist will merely confirm a negative image: the brooding, distant Scot, rereading Paradise Regained in his study while the rest of world romps through The Da Vinci Code. A man, in Milton’s own words, “Who reads incessantly . . . deep-versed in books and shallow in himself”.

I read him another way: last week’s glimpse of Brown’s bookshelves suggests not the whiff of the musty library to me, but a breath of fresh air. I don’t share all his tastes: I can live without reading another word of Tennyson, and Wells has not aged well. Yet there is an intellectual hinterland here, a thinking man who knows where he comes from: “Sea and sky and the folk who wrote and fought and were learned, teaching and saying and praying, they lasted but as a breath, a mist of fog in the hills, but the land was forever, it moved and changed below you, but was forever.” (Sunset Song) This is a politician-reader for whom books are not mere furnishings — nor even primarily a source of entertainment or relaxation — but the fount of inspiration, argument and self-betterment. That may be an old-fashioned attitude to literature; it may not make him a good prime minister, but it makes him a far more interesting individual.

I suspect Brown revealed his somewhat daunting reading list not out of intellectual snobbery, not to impress the electorate or raise himself up on the genius of others, but because, like many bookish and solitary people, his books are the best, perhaps the only, way for him to define who he is.

Gordon Brown might fudge what he listens to on his iPod, but he would never misrepresent what is stacked in his mental shelving: the Chancellor is an open book.

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