Gordon Brown was quite young when “this guy comes to the door of the manse”. Gordon’s parents have popped out, but he’s well schooled: to a parishioner in need you offer help. He’s seen it again and again — his father, the Rev John Brown, dispensing food, money and advice to the poor. The morality is in his blood. He hears it from the pulpit twice a day on Sunday.
“So as my parents taught me, I say, what do you want — help yourself! And when they come back, the town’s most notorious burglar is sitting in the kitchen [the chuckle wells up] but only taking food!” Not the family silver?
“No, we didn’t have much to lose there! But it was very funny that I’d invited in somebody who normally broke in.” It’s impossible not to join in his full-throated laughter. Then he adds: “There’s a group of people, you know, who when they come out of prison just offend to go back in.”
The tale, and the manner of the telling, reveal much about the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The sheer quantity of the laughter all through our first interview surprised me, but his swift segue into the social lesson of the anecdote did not. Neither self-conscious nor overly didactic, it demonstrated an understanding of that long-ago miscreant off the street in windy Kirkcaldy — and a need to teach me too.
We were at the Labour Party conference, where, over three days, I began my Gordon Brown trail, which ended at the Treasury. I watched him at social events, interviewed him twice, read his volume of speeches (all good stuff, with admiring introductions from the likes of Kofi Annan and J. K. Rowling), talked to people about him — and, with absolutely no preconceptions, became fascinated by the strong feelings he provokes. A cynical friend said that Brown would be pleasant only to manipulate me. Some people spat out his name, but at a No 11 event that he hosted for the London Child Poverty Commission, people working for charities dealing with poverty, disability and development gushed private praise with the fervour of the converted. Three powerful women, one a waspish columnist, one a distinguished broadcaster and one a Labour MP, told me how very sexy they find the Scot who would be Prime Minister. (Actually, ladies, I rather agree; it’s the combination of power, intellect and that accent — yet it doesn’t work with John Reid.)
Bemused that people sneered at his heinous habit of hauling serious books on holiday (why wouldn’t you?), I puzzled over the “psychologically flawed” criticisms from those who are, presumably, psychologically perfect. As someone who remembers internecine conflict in the Labour Party of the Seventies I wondered why quite so much hot air was expended on the Gordon and Tony show — but knew, watching their two contrasting performances on the conference platform, which one rang more true with me. “Project Gordon” is the name given to what many pundits see as uneasy efforts to “rebrand” the Iron Chancellor to face up to charming young Mr Cameron. Yet judging by his significant intervention on the world trade front, GB is squaring up to a rather different quarry. Why else choose the moment when George W. Bush looks more battered than ever to issue a coded challenge to the President’s famed indifference to “environmental care (and a) better global relationship between rich and poor”? This speech was his strongest signal to date, not only that he intends to be seen as a statesman on the world stage — but also that he has no intention of replicating “Yo” Blair’s buddy-buddy association with an unpopular and discredited President. In attacking American protectionism Brown was cleverly choosing the moment when a bruised Bush has to start listening.
Gordon Brown calls himself a champion of globalisation and no doubt he’d be pleased to be caricatured as knight in shining armour on a quest to save the world from itself. Let others assess his achievements as the longest-serving Chancellor for 200 years; my interest begins and ends in story — the archetypal narratives of human experience. Seeking what makes GB tick I don’t, in the end, dwell on his long, careful replies to political questions, because you couldn’t put a cigarette paper between his public views and those Tony Blair might express. Instead, like a fundamentalist to the Bible, I turn for signposts to one of the most brilliant books of recent years, Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots. Of the great quest in literature, Booker writes: “Our interest centres on the hero’s long, difficult journey towards some distant, enormously important goal.” This always begins with a “call”, then comes the long voyage during which the hero and his companions have to face obstacles and transforming experiences, before the final confrontation. And the goal? To succeed to the kingdom, of course.
THE CALL
When, to explain his values, Brown invoked his parents in his conference speech, this was more significant than the “son of the manse” cliché can encompass. He finds it hard to talk about them — still bruised by the “finality” (a word he used to me three times) of their loss. “My mother died only two years ago; my father in 1998, so in the time I’ve been Chancellor they’ve both died, and it was never my intention to draw my memories into the public arena. But people need to know what I stand for. You’ve got to explain your background and on that basis people may understand me better. I don’t feel that talking and talking about yourself is . . . mmm . . . People need to judge you on what you do, but they do want to know why you do what you do.”
That John and Elizabeth Brown instilled a sense of morality in their three sons is well known; that there was nothing dour or Calvinistic about their home life is not. When I ask if the little GB had to be “good”, he chuckles that his home was “very easygoing”. His father’s religion was based on faith, hope and charity; John Brown’s voice speaks constantly through the politician son when — both times we talk — he evangelises the West’s absolute moral duty to help the poor elsewhere in the world, especially Africa. If I had to isolate one overwhelming impression of Brown, it is this passion — the sermon he returns to again and again, fuelled by the conviction (for example) that no right-minded, compassionate person could know that it would take only £60 a year to educate an African child and not want to give it. When I question whether the average punter — or the constituent who cares only about having a clean, efficient hospital — really “gets” this, he looks at me in disbelief. His parents taught him boundless optimism and the belief in things greater than yourself — and that tone of inspirational gravitas permeated his pronouncement on free trade, that “prosperity to be sustained (has) to be shared”.
If a happy childhood watching the two most important people in his world devote themselves to service formed Brown, the rugby accident, which cost him the sight of one eye, was the first major obstacle he had to overcome — and probably most shaped the kind of politician he is. In Manchester he brushed off my prompt that it must have been awful with a jovial “a bit of a shock”! But next time he raised it unprompted, in the context of believing in people’s undiscovered potential (one of his big themes) and why he went into politics. “I was brought up in a household where we talked about these things . . . I mean . . . I . . . spent a lot of time in hospital with the eye injury. And I think, one route closes to you, like playing rugby and football, so you’ve got to think very clearly about the routes opening. Then you decide that some things have to be more important than others. Remember I was in and out of hospital for about five years from 16, and the last operation was the worst one because I was in danger of losing the sight of what was my good eye too.”
Eye surgery (in his case for a detached retina) is known to cause trauma, especially when long immobilisation is required, as it was with Brown. The superb sportsman, the team player, was compelled to settle into a long, solitary, dark stillness, during which the sense of loss would have been compounded by the fear of blindness. All the considerable power of his mind would have been focused on coping with unruly destiny; in those circumstances concentrating on the inner world is the only means of survival. Sense must be made of what has set you apart from your peers; the inevitable “why me?” will (in a strong character) lead from an issue of victimhood to a sense of being chosen. You see this still on his face — provoking familiar adjectives such as “dark”, “brooding” and “obsessive”.
I think it explains his slight awkwardness, as well as accusations that he is impatient with matters (and people?) he can’t immediately master. The powerful inner world is often at variance with the external; what’s more a person is not “clubbable if they’ve had to focus on themselves as the ‘club’ ”. Gordon Brown expects attention, for that’s what you get as a teenager in hospital. Did he dream then of becoming Prime Minister? I doubt it. The “call” was to challenge authority and to do his duty in public service, because his father taught that “people working together can change things for the better — part of an optimism about human nature”. But all that necessitates facing down monsters, and the tough thing for GB to acknowledge is that some will be beyond control.
