Review: My Life, Our Times, by Gordon Brown

Bodley Head £25

Review by Iain Macwhirter

HE WAS robbed, I tell you, robbed. Not once but twice. Everyone knew that Gordon was the best man to take over as Labour leader after John Smith's untimely death in 1994. But that sneaky arriviste Tony Blair played dirty and managed to enlist the press on his side while Brown was still grieving.

There were dirty tricks. Rumours that Gordon was gay. To save the party from debilitating division, he did the decent thing and allowed Tony to borrow the crown – on the strict understanding that he would hand it back during his second term.

And what did he do? Blair went on and on as prime minister, breaking his Granita pledge, leaving Gordon to take over the fag end of an administration whose credibility had been destroyed by Tony's reckless Iraq war. Needless to say, Gordon knew nothing about Iraq and was merely obeying orders. If he'd known what he knows now...

It is unfortunate that this account of Gordon Brown’s life and times reads like a settling of old scores. He probably was outmanoeuvred by Tony Blair over the Labour leadership – that’s how politics works. But Gordon is deluding himself if he believes that everyone thought he was a shoo-in for leader in 1994. I was in Westminster's lobby at the time John Smith died and, while there was great respect for Gordon Brown, most of the MPs I spoke to – even many Scottish ones – had reservations about his ability to lead. That insincere smile; the boy scout mottos; the rather dour Scottishness. He was a brilliant Shadow Chancellor: a genuine innovator in policy, forensic in debate, capable of using ridicule to devastating effect at the Dispatch Box. But the man to lead Middle England?

Tony Blair was a brilliant if shallow salesman, certainly, but politics needs a bit of that – and they made a great double act. Bono was right to call them the Lennon and McCartney of politics – thought it's revealing of Gordon's tin ear for posterity that he quotes the Irish pop star, and litters his political testament with other dropped names. In the first five pages of this book alone we get: Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama, George Bush, Bill Clinton, Angela Merkel and even Donald Trump. He doesn't need to do this.

Indeed, he didn’t need to write this book rebutting every slight against him from the false suggestion that he'd fiddled his expenses to the nonsense that he'd plagiarised his “moral compass”. Some stones are better left unturned. Brown reveals that he hired his brother, Andrew, in 1994 to keep a record of exactly what was said by whom over the weeks of Granita and “the deal” with Blair over the leadership. He repeatedly quotes from Andrew's record as if anyone would believe his brother was an independent witness.

Reading this book I kept wanting to say: Gordon, you're bigger than this. And he is. Brown was an extraordinary politician and it is no exaggeration to say that his policies improved the lives of millions of people. The windfall tax on the utilities, child tax credits, the national minimum wage, rebuilding the NHS, world debt relief. He showed global leadership in responding to the 2007 financial crash and his stimulus programme may have prevented another Great Depression.

Gordon Brown almost certainly saved the National Health Service from the privatisation plans of Tony Blair and his Health Secretary Pat Hewitt, who wanted “no limit to private provision”. His much-maligned stealth taxes worked: Brown doubled spending on health in real terms during the Labour years and slashed pensioner and child poverty.

I'm inclined to believe that he had profound reservations about the Iraq war, the defining issue of the Blair years. He says he didn't force the issue because he was already fighting with his leader over tuition fees, NHS foundation hospitals and had been threatened with the sack over his refusal to support Britain joining the euro. Brown says that an intelligence document prepared for the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2002, which showed the evidence for Saddam's weapons of mass destruction was flimsy at best, was withheld, and that "we were not just misinformed but misled on the critical issue of WMD”.

That's a very serious charge and Tony Blair's former Chief of Staff Jonathan Powell denies the existence of this document. The publication of these memoirs has reawakened old rivalries. He claims that Tony Blair not only blocked his attempts to increase taxes on the wealthy, but wanted to cut the top rate of tax to 35%. On Scotland, Brown claims that, like Alex Salmond, he wanted a third “devo max” option in the 2014 independence referendum. No one seems to recall him saying so at the time.

Brown clearly feels that he was an analogue politician in a digital age, and laments his failure to grasp the significance of social media. He also says he wasn't “touchy feely” enough, which is probably just as well, given the “he-touched-my-knee” scandals currently rocking “Pestminster”. And given his obsessive regard for his reputation, he was probably better off without a Twitter account. But Brown was arguably Britain’s greatest post-war chancellor and also its worst prime minister. History will be kind to him, eventually.