This is an opportune moment, following Gordon Brown's momentous statement [2] earlier today, to revisit my Books Interview [3] with Christopher Harvie [4], MSP for the Scottish National Party and author of Broonland: the Last Days of Gordon Brown.

Your book Broonland traces the political trajectory of Gordon Brown. You first met him in the mid-1970s, didn't you?
He worked part-time for the Open University and I worked in the history department. But I really got to know him in autumn 1978, when I moved to the Institute for Advanced Studies at Edinburgh University. Brown and I came together when we were running the Lothian Labour campaign for a Yes vote in the 1979 referendum on the Scotland Act. He emerged from that campaign with very great credit, whereas the rest of the Labour Party was nowhere. I suspect that out of that came a degree of disillusionment on his part with the party. The guys who worked hardest were the Communists - the NUM vice-president Mick McGahey, people like that. The Communists were dogmatic, but they were honest! These are the people that Lawrence Daly [the Scottish miners' leader at whose funeral last year Brown read the eulogy] came from. And don't forget that quite a few contributions to The Red Paper on Scotland, edited by Brown, came from the Communist Party. Brown had a degree of trust in these guys that he didn't have either in the machine politicians of west central Scotland or in the Trots.

You can read the rest of the interview here [3].

Special offer: get 12 issues of the New Statesman for just £5.99 plus a free copy of "Liberty in the Age of Terror" by A C Grayling. [5]