Where are the other retired men of the front line? It’s a well-populated Valhalla. Tony Blair is off to Gaza on Donald Trump’s ticket. David Cameron is granting us one of his periods of silence, perhaps soon to be broken by service in a dying government. David Miliband is prince across the water to an ever-smaller band of faithfuls as his hair gets greyer and greyer. The others resign themselves to retirement: presenting ostensibly antagonistic political podcasts that are often about as interesting as Teletext.
James Gordon Brown spends his days – hours of them – walking up, down and around the hill behind his house in North Queensferry, Fife. Battered by winds from Inverkeithing Bay, he relives the old battles. Should I have spoken to Robin before Iraq? What if I had called that election in 2007? Should I have made Ed chancellor rather than Alistair? Could I have beaten Tony in 1994?
Brown is different. That’s what his biographer James Macintyre, a former New Statesman political correspondent, wants us to take away from this new book, a non-authorised study which nevertheless enjoyed broad access to Brown, his family and his papers. It breezily skips from his childhood in postwar Fife through the career in front-line politics, to his post-premiership work as a titan of the charity sector, all stitched together with new archival material and interviews with the key players in Brown’s life.
Though he is sympathetic, what Macintyre is forced to address is that there are two Browns. One is the son of the manse turned saintly anti-poverty crusader turned upstanding elder statesman. That’s the view of Angela Rayner and all those others who feel their life chances were transformed by his 13 years at the top of government, as well as the median Labour Party member. Then there is the other Brown: the thin-skinned paranoiac prone to fits of self-pitying rage, a nightmare boss who deployed the dark arts of spin far more recklessly than the Blairites. Those who had to deal with him from 1997 to 2010 but were outside his charmed circle remember this forbidding figure. Age has taken the edge off. Nicola Sturgeon, once one of Brown’s great despisers, has now melted like fondant partly as a result of reading this book, she claimed in an early review.
Somebody once said Brown ended up as a radio-age prime minister in a time of rolling news. Perhaps. It’s a great voice, all basso profondo. He and his aides were always much more vigilant about how he looked than what he said: trouser legs tucked into socks, V-neck sweaters worn back to front. These were endearing symbols of his lack of polish compared with Blair. So too his lack of facility for schmoozing. Brown is notoriously terrible with names. His stock phrase, when confronted by some wide-eyed lackey, was: “Thank you for all that you do.”
The difference between Blair and Brown – and they will forever and always be compared – began in the Sixties. Unlike Blair, Brown’s Sixties politics had nothing to do with libertine indulgences, nor dalliances with Trotskyist sects that would later embarrass him, but a steely and solid involvement in the anti-apartheid protest movement. While chairing Edinburgh University’s Labour club, he purged Trots rather than joining them. There is just one flash of counter-culture in this retelling of his youth: in his successful run to become rector of Edinburgh, his female supporters were dubbed “the Brown Sugars”. But Brown, we learn from Macintyre, was a soixante-huitard only by chronology, spending 1968 in a hospital bed thanks to three major operations on a detached retina. No wonder those arch-enemies of Sixties culture, Peter Hitchens and Paul Dacre, rather wanted Brown to stay on as PM in 2010. He was a far more conservative statesman than the hip alternative, Cameron.
When they reached the top, Brown and Blair had a handful of fallouts over policy that managed to dominate ten years in government: the euro, the first introduction of tuition fees, foundation trust hospitals and tax credits. Damian McBride, Brown’s most talented spinner, has reflected that the so-called “TB-GBs” – the notion of a constant struggle at the top of the party – actually helped Labour, depriving the Tories of political oxygen. But how real was it? The euro debate, in retrospect, seems a mirage. As one old Blairite put it to me recently over tea at a Pall Mall club, where these New Labour figures now dwell, it was in Brown’s interest to play anti-European for the benefit of the right-wing papers, despite his deeply pro-EU convictions.
Likewise, Blair could live happily with sterling, but the notion of him pushing for the euro against the wishes of his obstinate, provincial chancellor gave him credit among the leaders of the EU. On foundation hospitals too, Blair ended up siding with Brown against the radical plans of his supposed proxy, Alan Milburn, after months of futile slanging matches in the papers. Much of the TB-GBs was smoke and mirrors. It was not about some deep ideological difference between Blairites and Brownites. They were political siblings and their relationship was symbiotic. It’s just Brown always thought he should be the older brother.
I will assume NS readers are familiar with the broad contours of Brown’s decade at the Treasury: Bank of England independence, the golden rule (sunny-sounding ancestor of our own “fiscal rules”), the windfall tax, the minimum wage, the 2002 Budget gamble (raising National Insurance to fund the NHS, now considered a politically impossible move) and tax credits. Throughout, Brown’s moral mission was poverty alleviation. The joke in the civil service was, if you want Brown to approve any policy, present him a chart that shows it will enrich the poorest 10 per cent of society.
Blair nearly moved him several times. Kick him into the Foreign Office, his advisers counselled. But how could he? Despite the nightmare of interpersonal relations between Nos 10 and 11, it seemed the UK was enjoying one of its most successful economic periods on record. Macintyre states the now conventional view: “For all of Blair’s campaigning brilliance, the New Labour agenda would not have stacked up if Brown’s economic policies had been more vulnerable to criticism.”
But Brown’s crown, when he finally got it after Blair’s resignation, proved heavy. Some of it was bad luck, some of it was reaping what had earlier been sown (his happy-go-lucky neglect of City regulation, for example, when the financial crisis landed). But above all, from 2007 there was what Macintyre correctly identifies as “a new indecisiveness – even nervousness – in Brown after he took on the top job”. The signs were there at that jabbering first PMQs. Brown had been the leading House of Commons man of his generation. To his opponents at Treasury Questions, he was frankly terrifying, with a capacious memory for and command of policy detail, and his relentless, crushing argumentation. But outside his fiefdom, he suddenly seemed naked.
Then there was the election, or the non-election – Brown’s Grand Old Duke of York moment. In October 2007 the trade unions were already printing campaigning leaflets. Ed Balls was in his constituency with a photographer preparing shots for his election flyers. Then Brown backed out. The polling in marginal seats looked bad, and he didn’t want to be remembered as one of our shortest-serving PMs. Fair enough. But it took him weeks to tell the people around him, by which point the Labour and Conservative parties were on a war footing. The “Iron Chancellor” had become “Brown the Bottler”. After that, Brown’s government became a wash of jittery indecision, fear and lack of purpose as it headed towards defeat at the next election.
All that manic New Labour micromanagement and media manipulation was diverted – into what? A rolling barrage of ridiculous gimmicks as the government moved closer to its expiration date. Holding a cabinet meeting at the Birmingham ICC – how down to earth. Inviting Margaret Thatcher to No 10 – that will shock the lobby and befuddle Cameron for five minutes. The “government of all the talents”, which meant appointing the ennobled clown Digby Jones to an ignominious 18-month stint as a trade minister (the role was “dehumanising”, he wailed, before hopping on the Brexit bandwagon a few years later). Granting Ted Kennedy a knighthood, gee whiz! And, of course, the decision to bring Peter Mandelson back from the political dead. Contrast the achievements of Brown’s Treasury with this crap. They took as much energy to execute and achieved nothing. Which Brown himself tacitly admitted in one of his better speeches, at the 2009 conference, when he read the last rites on New Labour and all it had achieved. A large chunk was his own accomplishments as chancellor, very little of it anything he had done since becoming PM.
Macintyre tries to rescue Brown the PM from the fate of the “tail-end Charlies”: Douglas-Home, Callaghan and Sunak, those doomed to captain a sinking ship. There was his global leadership during the crash, which the Tories and their papers would give him no credit for at the time. Now he is garlanded with praise as the man who “saved the world” by eminences like Barack Obama. There were the Climate Change Act and the Equality Act, which are now more contested than ever by the rising forces on the British right. There is also his post-premiership career, which Macintyre fashions as a sort of “moral leadership”, with Brown as the last true statesman in a world of crooks. Compared to his rivals, there is a case to be made there. His turn as chief inquisitor in the Mandelson affair is the latest example.
But despite his biographer’s best efforts, it’s Brown himself who can’t stop living in the past. Macintyre, who is quite open about his process of research, says that he consulted Brown before approaching Blair to be interviewed for the book. “I don’t think you’ll get a balanced account,” snapped Brown. In his interviews with Macintyre, quoted in the book, Blair of course is effusive with praise for Brown’s “astonishingly high-quality intellect” and even modestly refers to himself as “the junior partner” in their relationship for the first decade. But he can afford to let bygones be bygones, because he won.
It all comes back to the deal, oh, the deal. In the end it probably ruined everything for Brown. So much ink has been spilled over what really happened after John Smith’s untimely death, nearly as much as the sweat and tears Brown probably spent on it. But the dispute comes down to this: Tony said he would do ten years, as he wanted to spend time with his children by the time they were teenagers. Gordon says he thought that meant ten years as leader, with Tony stepping down as PM in 2004. Tony thought it meant ten years as PM, so the clock didn’t start ticking until the first election victory in 1997.
Granita, the supposedly climactic final meeting on the subject, has been overblown and Ed Balls, who was at the table with the pair at the start of their dinner, now doubts Brown’s own account of what was agreed. He reflects, wisely: “It may have been what Tony Blair said, but he shouldn’t have said it, and it may have been what Gordon believed, and he probably shouldn’t.” Cherie Blair says there was never an agreement about succession at all, but her nice-guy husband let Brown believe otherwise. The real decision – one on one, Tony vs Gordon – was made two weeks earlier in Brown’s North Queensferry home, under that same hill where the grand old man of British politics walks today, incessantly playing over what could have been.
He served in No 10 for about as long as the discredited, half-remembered Theresa May. Under his leadership, the Labour Party got a lower share of the popular vote than under JR Clynes in 1922. But despite all that, this lively reappraisal has a message for Gordon Brown, with which I concur: you are as significant a historical figure as Tony Blair. Will that ever be enough?
Gordon Brown: Power with Purpose
James Macintyre
Bloomsbury, 336pp, £25.00
[Further reading: Gordon Brown: Police need to interview Andrew]
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This article appears in the 25 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Crumbling Crown
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Subscribe here to commentThe Blair, Brown years were the best 10 years of any Labour Party Government since the Party was founded. I rejoined the Party in 1994 when Blair was elected leader and stayed on until Brown took over in 2007. My memories are different from the review above. Brown was always the person who had to be named as being the bringer of good news and his colleagues reported that if you wanted anything passed which affected the Treasury, you allowed Brown to bring it to parliament. We were not allowed to join the Euro because of the restrictions that the European Bank placed on monetary policy. That these restrictions would have saved us from the Financial Crisis in 2007/8 is not mentioned in the review. That Brown was described by Blair in one of his PMQ replies to Cameron as a clunking fist which will eventually floor you (Cameron) proved untrue as Cameron was twice as light on his feet as Brown was. That Brown had to be rescued by John Reed when Cameron asked a trick question on security surprised no one. That the abolition of the reduced rate of tax on the Standard Rate led to foreseen issues on low earners led to a meeting with John McFall to whom Brown kept shouting “You’re Wrong”until it was pointed out to him that he was wrong. A sorry history of a great man plagued by insecurity and vanity.