GORDON BROWN EPUB ED EB

Tom Bower

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780007259625
• eBook ISBN: 9780007388851
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The gripping inside story of Gordon Brown's rise to become Prime Minister.

Gordon Brown's arrival at the Treasury in May 1997 was greeted with great excitement – not to mention anticipation. Officials of every rank looked on expectantly to see what miracles the chancellor would work. And so, as Master of the New Era, Brown created relationships across every Whitehall department and extended his influence to every aspect of government. He brought into effect the most important budgetary changes of the past decade: the commitment to Private Finance Initiative, which altered infrastructure from the London Underground to the NHS and state schools; the management of the Inland Revenue; the increase in taxes; and the demise of Britain's pension funds.

In this gripping and fully updated biography, reissued to coincide with Brown's assumption of Tony Blair's mantle, best-selling author Tom Bower documents the rise to power of a driven and complex politician, and exposes how the ambitions of the Labour Party's leader-in-waiting will affect the country for decades to come.

ONE

Ghosts and Dreams

The stench of linseed oil and coal drifting up the hill obliterated the salty odour of the cold sea waves crashing just four hundred yards from his family’s large stone house. Two linoleum factories were part of Kirkcaldy’s lifeblood, just as the small town’s financial survival relied upon the local coalmines. Both were dying industries, threatening new unemployment in the neighbourhood. The men of Fife profess to be self-contained, but are vulnerable to their environment. Kirkcaldy’s stench, grime and decay shaped Gordon Brown’s attitude towards the world.

Kirkcaldy in the 1950s could have been a thousand miles from Edinburgh, although the elegant capital lay just across the Firth of Forth. Gordon Brown’s home town was shabby, and the townspeople were not a particularly united community. John Brown, his father, the minister at St Brycedale Presbyterian church, struggled unsuccessfully to retain his congregation. Some had permanently renounced the Church, while others had moved to the suburbs, abandoning the less fortunate in the town. Outsiders would have discovered nothing exceptional about John Brown’s ministry in Kirkcaldy’s largest church. His status was principally attractive to those at the bottom of the heap, who called regularly at Brown’s rectory – or manse – for help. The preacher of the virtues of charity was willing to feed the hungry, give money to those pleading poverty, and tend the sick. Some would smile that John Brown was an unworldly soft touch, giving to the undeserving, but his generosity contrasted favourably with Fife’s local leaders. There was little to commend about the councillors’ failure to build an adequate sea wall to protect the town from the spring tides of 1957 and 1958. During the floods, young Gordon Brown helped his father and his two brothers distribute blankets and food to the victims, proud that his father became renowned as a dedicated, social priest. ‘Father,’ he later said, ‘was a generous person and made us aware of poverty and illness.’ The dozens of regular callers at the house pleading for help persuaded Brown of the virtues of Christian socialism, meaning service to the community and helping people realise their potential. Living in a manse, he related, ‘You find out quickly about life and death and the meaning of poverty, injustice and unemployment.’ The result was a schoolboy bursting to assuage his moral indignation.

Friends and critics of Gordon Brown still seek to explain the brooding, passionate and perplexing politician by the phrase ‘a son of the manse’. To non-believers, unaware of daily life in a Scottish priest’s home, the five words are practically meaningless. Only an eyewitness to the infusion of Scotland’s culture by Presbyterianism’s uncompromising righteousness can understand the mystery of the faith. Life in the manse bequeathed an osmotic understanding of the Bible. Under his father’s aegis, Gordon Brown mastered intellectual discipline and a critique of conventional beliefs. In a Presbyterian household, the term ‘morality’ was dismissed as an English concept, shunned in favour of emphasising ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Even the expression ‘socialism’ was rejected in favour of ‘egalitarianism’. At its purest, Presbyterianism is a questioning tradition, encouraging a lack of certainty, with a consequent insecurity among true believers brought up to believe in perpetual self-improvement. ‘Lord, I believe,’ is the pertinent prayer. ‘Help Thou my unbelief.’ Moulded by his father’s creed, not least because he admired and loved the modest man, the young Gordon Brown was taught to be respectful towards strangers. ‘My father was,’ he recalled, ‘more of a social Christian than a fundamentalist … I was very impressed with my father. First, for speaking without notes in front of so many people in that vast church. But mostly, I have learned a great deal from what my father managed to do for other people. He taught me to treat everyone equally and that is something I have not forgotten.’

In his sermons, quoting not only the scriptures but also poets, politicians and Greek and Latin philosophers, the Reverend John Brown urged ‘the importance of the inner world – what kind of world have we chosen for our inner self? Does it live in the midst of the noblest thoughts and aspirations?’ He cautioned his congregation and sons against ‘those who hasten across the sea to change their sky but not their mind’. Happiness, he preached, is not a matter of miles but of mental attitude, not of distance but of direction. ‘The question which each of us must ask, if we are not as happy as we would wish to be, is this: Are we making the most of the opportunities that are ours?’ The young Gordon Brown was urged to understand the challenge to improve his own destiny. ‘So let us not trifle,’ preached his father, condemning wasted time and opportunities, ‘because we think we have plenty of time ahead of us. We do not know what time we have. We cannot be sure about the length of life … Therefore use your time wisely. Live as those who are answerable for every moment and every hour.’

John Brown’s ancestry was as modest as his lifestyle. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Browns were tenant farmers, first at Inchgall Mill near Dunfermline, and later at Brigghills farm near Lochgelly, in the midst of the Fife coalfields. Ebenezer Brown, Gordon Brown’s grandfather, the fourth of eight children, became a farmer at Peatieshill in New Gilston, and on 26 October 1914 Gordon’s father was born in the farmhouse. Eventually Ebenezer gave up farming and became a shepherd, encouraging his only child to excel at school and to break out of the mould. At eighteen, John Brown’s efforts were rewarded by a place at St Andrews University to read divinity. After graduating in 1935, he studied for an MA in theology until 1938. Unfit for military service, he spent the war as a minister in the Govan area, along the Clyde, living among the slums and destitution of the factory and shipyard workers. Only the heartless could emerge from that poverty without some anger about society’s inequalities.

Soon after the war John Brown met Jessie Elizabeth Souter, the daughter of a builder and ironmonger in Insch, west Aberdeenshire. She was four years younger than him. Until 1940 Jessie had worked for the family business. She then joined the WRAF, working first on the Isle of Man and then in Whitehall. They married in Govan in July 1947. Their first child, John, was born in 1948. James Gordon, their second son, was born in Glasgow on 20 February 1951. Three years later John Brown was appointed the minister at the St Brycedale church. Kirkcaldy was then an unknown backwater, except to historians. In the eighteenth century Adam Smith, arguably one of the world’s greatest economists and the architect of free trade, the foundation of Britain’s prosperity, lived in the town. A monument to the enemy of socialism was erected exactly opposite St Brycedale church. The juxtaposition was pertinent to Gordon Brown’s life. Not until forty years after his birth did he begin to sympathise with his fellow townsman’s philosophy. By then his reputation as an irascible intellectual was frustrating his ambitions. His inner conflict, pitting his quest for power against his scholarship, his mastery of machine politics in conflict with the protection of his privacy, had been infused by the influence of his beloved father.

‘Ill pairted’, the principal doctrine bequeathed by the teetotal father to his sons in the manse, condemned the unfair distribution of wealth in the world and stirred up his family’s obligation to seek greater equality, not least by good works and charity. The collapse of the textile and coal industries, casting hundreds in the town onto the dole, imbued a gut distaste for capitalist society in Gordon Brown, not least because his father taught that work was a moral duty. ‘Being brought up as the son of a minister,’ he recalled, ‘made me aware of community responsibilities that any decent society ought to accept. And strong communities remain the essential bedrock for individual prosperity.’ Unspoken was the Scottish belief in superiority over the English, and the Presbyterian’s sense of pre-eminent differences with Anglicans – both compensations for surviving as a minority.

Helped by Elizabeth Brown’s inheritance of some small legacies, the Browns were middle class. Their financial advantages over the local miners and factory workers spurred the father to encourage his children to conduct their lives with a sense of mission, duty and benign austerity. Any personal ambition was to be concealed, because the individual, in John Brown’s world, was of little interest, and personal glory was, history showed, short-lived. Rather than bask in the prestige accorded to his office, he preached that his children should be more concerned by the legacy they bequeathed to society. The son of the manse was expected to suppress his ego. That exhortation, repeated constantly throughout his childhood (he attended his father’s church twice on Sundays), imposed upon Gordon Brown a lifelong obligation to answer to his father’s ghost.

Any austerity was, however, tempered by love. Elizabeth Brown was not as strong an influence as her husband, but she was a true friend. ‘She was always supportive,’ Brown insisted, ‘even when I made mistakes.’ At the age of thirty-seven, he was to say: ‘I don’t think either of my parents pushed me. It was a very free and open family. There were no huge pressures.’ His comment was either self-delusion or obfuscation. Quite emphatically, from his youngest years, Brown was under exceptional pressure to excel, and infused with an obsession to work hard, to disappoint no one and to win. ‘What is started, must be finished,’ was a constant parental admonition to the Brown brothers. Failure was inconceivable. From the pulpit the Reverend John Brown preached that many of the young ‘are failing to think life through and are living carelessly and irresponsibly’. They forgot, he said, that regardless of any remarkable achievements on earth, ‘after death we must appear before the judgement seat of Christ’. He admonished ‘the multitudes’ who gave ‘little thought of accountability for their conduct and way of life’. Gordon Brown was warned about a day of reckoning: ‘With many, judgement begins and ends with themselves and they reckon not on any judgement from elsewhere. Such live to please themselves and not to please others, even God.’ John Brown urged his congregation to look forward to His commendation: ‘Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of thy Lord.’

Gordon Brown’s blessing, or possibly misfortune, was his stardom. From his earliest years he was praised as outstanding, destined to outclass his contemporaries. Like all Scots children, he was embraced by the country’s excellent system of state education. At Kirkcaldy West, a primary school close to the linoleum factory, he was taught the three ‘R’s by repetition, writing with pencils on slate boards, with a wet rag to wipe off his daily work. He devoured books and, thanks to an aunt, a music teacher, appreciated classic literature. The teachers instantly recognised his unusual intelligence, reporting that he was a year ahead of other pupils in maths and reading, as was one other boy, Murray Elder, who would remain his friend in Scottish Labour politics and Westminster until the present day. At the age of ten, Brown and Elder were enrolled at Kirkcaldy High School, the town’s grammar school, in an educational experiment to fast-stream the town’s brightest schoolchildren by intensive learning.

The High School was a genuine social mixture. The children of dustmen, miners and millionaires were educated together, ignoring their social differences. But the searing recollections of the parents of the poorer children about the days before the creation of the NHS made a lasting impression on Brown. Their elders spoke of the poor abandoning treatment in hospitals when their money was spent, and asking doctors about the cost of visits and medicine before deciding whether their finances were adequate for them to receive treatment.

Ferociously clever, although not the cleverest in the class, Brown never appeared as a swot. Rather he was known as ‘gregarious and jolly’, and the quickest to provoke laughter with a snappy, funny line. ‘The banter and wisecracking that would go on between the boys was great,’ recalled a former class friend. Brown’s passion was sport. He excelled at tennis, rowing, sprinting, rugby and especially football. Around the time he heard the radio commentary of Scotland’s 9–3 humiliation by England in 1961, he resolved to become a professional footballer. On Saturdays, he was seen at the ground of Raith Rovers, the local football team, selling programmes with John, his elder brother, to earn pocket money before cheering the local side. Combining work and pleasure was his father’s doctrine. The most notable result was the newspaper Gordon produced in his pre-teens with his brother and sold for charity. John was the editor while Gordon wrote the sports reports, and later added commentaries about domestic politics. In successive weeks in 1964 he welcomed Harold Wilson’s election, interviewed an American space pioneer, described the persecution of Jews and supported Israel’s existence, and explained the background to crises in the Middle East and Southern Rhodesia. Justifying the new state of Israel was a particular theme encouraged by his father. Brown revealed himself not as precocious, but as a sensible and informed youth. His love of history and politics was partially influenced by ‘Tammy’ Dunn, the school’s left-wing history teacher, although his historical hero in the fourth form was Robert Peel, the nineteenth-century Tory prime minister praised for placing principle before party. In a competition organised by the Scottish Daily Express to write an essay anticipating Britain in the year 2000, Brown won a £200 prize. He predicted that Scotland’s inequalities would eventually be removed: ‘The inheritance of a respect for every individual’s freedom and identity,’ he wrote, ‘and the age-long quality of caring, both transmitted through our national religion, law and educational system and evident in the lives of countless generations of our people, makes Scotland ideal for pioneering the society which transcends political systems.’ Forty years later he remained faithful to what he called those ‘absolutely basic’ visions and values.

In 1963 Brown witnessed real politics for the first time. Aged eleven, he followed the election campaign in Kinross and Perthshire of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the prime minister. Ill-health had forced Harold Macmillan to resign, and his successor Earl Home had revoked his peerage to lead the Conservatives in the House of Commons. After a day following the politician across the constituency, the impression of a politician making the same speech at every venue, recalled Brown, was ‘awful’. He was particularly struck by Home’s response to a question of whether he would buy a house in the constituency. No, replied Home, he owned too many houses already.

At fourteen Brown took his ‘O’ levels, and under the fast-track experiment was scheduled one year later to take five Highers, a near equivalent of ‘A’ levels. He was a year ahead of his age group. His reputation was of an outstanding student and sportsman, particularly a footballer, whose conversation, magnetising his class friends, made him the centre of attention. Despite his popularity in the mixed school, he stood back from the girls. At the popular dances organised by his older brother in the church hall, Gordon did not bop, and disliked the waltz and quick-step lessons. No one recalled him ever speaking about girls. Even during a hilarious school trip to Gothenburg, his behaviour was impeccable. Some believed that the arrival every week of his father as school chaplain to preach to the children inhibited him. As predicted, at fifteen, he scored top marks in his Highers and qualified for university. He had survived the intensity of the ‘E’ experiment, but was troubled by the casualties among other ‘guinea pigs’ who, having collapsed under the pressure, were depressed by having failed to gain a place at university and being deprived of an opportunity to try again. Sensitive to the raw inequalities of life, uncushioned in Scotland’s bleak heartlands, he sought a philosophy which promised change.

At that age most teenagers rebel against their parents’ values, but Brown, inspired by his close family life, accepted his father’s traditionalist recipe for reform. In their unequivocal judgements of society, the Presbyterians’ solution was to empower the state to castigate the rich and to help the poor. In Kirkcaldy, Adam Smith’s philosophy for curing society’s ills by self-reliance and free enterprise was heresy. The socialist paradise promised by Harold Wilson, embracing the ‘white heat of technology’, redistribution of wealth and economic planning, was Gordon Brown’s ideal.

One irony of Brown’s registration at Edinburgh University in 1967 to read history would have been lost on the sixteen-year-old. The university was a bastion of privilege, isolated from Scotland’s class-ridden society. Dressed in a tweed jacket, grey flannels, white shirt and tie, Brown arrived with Kenn McLeod and other working-class achievers from Kirkcaldy High. While McLeod and the sons of miners and factory workers had neither the money nor the background to become involved in the horseplay of student life, Brown was introduced to the power brokers by his elder brother John.

‘This is my brother Gordon,’ John told Jonathan Wills, the editor of the student newspaper. ‘He’s sixteen and wants to work here. He’s boring but very clever.’ Brown was in heaven. The student newspaper was a cauldron of the university’s political and social activity. Within the editorial rooms he could witness heated debate and crude power-broking. Inspired by the worldwide student revolt then taking place, Jonathan Wills had begun a campaign to become the university’s first student rector. Free of the inhibitions imposed by his small home town, Brown indulged himself amid like-minded social equals. The liberation and the dream were short-lived.

Six months earlier, during a rugby match between the school and the old boys, he had emerged from the bottom of a scrum suffering impaired vision. Instinctively private, he did not complain or visit a doctor. The problem did not disappear. In a football match during the first weeks at university he headed the ball and his sight worsened. This time he consulted a doctor, who identified detached retinas in both eyes. The six-month delay in treatment had increased the damage, and there was a danger of blindness in the right eye. In the first of four operations over two years at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, surgeons sought to reattach the retinas. Brown was ordered to lie immobile for six months in a dark hospital ward, knowing that among the drastic consequences was the certain end of his ambition to become a professional footballer. Whatever the outcome of the operation, playing contact sports would be forbidden. During those months of darkness, with the combination of loneliness and fear described by him as ‘a living torture’, unable to read and hoping that he would not be permanently blind, Brown’s psychology changed. Sensitive to his plight and preoccupied by his ambitions, he became impatient with life’s trivialities, and resolved in future not to waste time or to suffer fools. ‘I felt such a fraud,’ he later said, ‘lying in bed for hours on end when there was nothing wrong with me except that I couldn’t see.’ Irritated by medicine’s limitations, his infirmity became a blow to his self-confidence, compounding the insecurity which would bedevil his life and inspire reconsideration of his faith. In a later interview, Brown mentioned his trepidation about the predestination preached by Calvinists. ‘The idea that it doesn’t matter what you do, that you could be predetermined for damnation’ was unappealing, he explained. He disliked the concept of ‘no credit for human endeavour since all decisions are made by God. It’s a very black religion in that sense.’ By contrast, his teetotal father’s practice of good works and charity was infinitely preferable; but doubts had also arisen about that. The Presbyterian ethic – that the afterlife was not so attractive – was also unappealing. Rather than embracing religion as support for his torment, his certainty about God and the scriptures had weakened. Neither in public nor in private would he ever express thanks to God or refer to Christianity as an influence, guide or support for his life.

He rejected the paraphrase of a poem often recited by John Brown at the sickbed:

He gives the conquest to the weak,
Supports the fainting heart,
And courage in the evil hour
His heavenly aids impart.

Rather, he was influenced by a pertinent sermon of his father’s summarising the lesson of anguish and salvation: ‘Blindness is surely one of life’s sorest handicaps … For them vistas of loveliness are shut off and bring no joy and gladness.’ John Brown’s sympathy for the blind switched to rhetorical criticism of the sighted: ‘Is it not the case that many of us – yes, most of us – even though we have our seeing faculties, walk blindly through life? We notice so little when we could see so much, passing by the wonders of creation without giving them a thought … Perhaps more people suffer from ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1: Ghosts and Dreams
• 2: Metamorphosis
• 3: Turbulence
• 4: Retreat
• 5: Seduction
• 6: ‘Do You Want Me to Write a Thank-You Letter?’
• 7: Fevered Honeymoon
• 8: Demons and Grudges
• 9: Enjoying Antagonism
• 10: Turmoil and Tragedy
• 11: Revolt
• 12: Aftermath
• 13: Bloodshed
• 14: Coup
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Source Notes
• Praise
• By the Same Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher