Boom to bust: Gordon Brown’s ‘My Life, Our Times’

Gordon Brown has waited seven years for this moment: the man who admits he never mastered the ability to “sculpt my public image in 140 characters” has finally given his own account of a momentous political career that ended with the crushing disappointment of electoral defeat in 2010.

In keeping with his reputation, the former Labour prime minister resisted the usual pressures to produce an instant memoir. To the frustration of the casual reader (and perhaps the publisher) he resists the temptation to engage in much gossip either. What Brown does provide is some score-settling, more self-criticism than one might expect, and a sense of deep frustration that his long wait to become prime minister ended with him struggling to cope with the job and seeing his economic legacy come crashing down.

Brown’s premiership will be remembered as a postscript to the Blair years, the political pivot from the “Nice” era — non-inflationary, continuous expansion — to the onset of a decade of austerity, triggered by the 2008 crash that dominated his time in Number 10. Throughout this regretful book there are roles for Tony Blair, who kept him waiting for the top job; the Liberal Democrats, who refused to strike a coalition deal with him after he lost his Commons majority; and Bank of England governor Mervyn King, who lent credibility to his Tory rival David Cameron’s austerity plan.

But Brown, 10 years after he became prime minister in 2007, concludes that he ultimately failed because he could not do “touchy-feely” politics. He claims this was because of “an inner sense that what mattered was not what I said about myself, but what our government could do for our country”.

Born in 1951, the son of a Fife church minister, Brown developed a sense of political mission after becoming aware of “the levels of unemployment and deprivation” in central Scotland. He describes a happy early life “focused more on sport than studies” but tells movingly of how a rugby injury left him without sight in his left eye and with reduced sight in his right eye; in 2009, in Downing Street, he feared that he might be about to lose his sight altogether.

Moral seriousness has undoubtedly been a leitmotif of Brown’s career. Yet the self-presentation at the heart of My Life, Our Times — that of a principled man unprepared to engage with the trivialities of modern politics — is only half true. After all, Brown’s very appeal when he took over from Tony Blair was that he was “Not Flash, Just Gordon”, the marketing phrase used by his team to show how different the former chancellor was from his spin-obsessed former boss. The public initially loved his shirtsleeves-rolled-up approach.

Nobody forced Brown to conduct his daily work in Downing Street in a “war room” surrounded by television screens, obsessing about the news cycle and trying to manage coverage. This innovation was immediately scrapped by the more insouciant Cameron.

Nor does the experience of Angela Merkel suggest that baring one’s inner soul on social media is the only way to achieve success in modern politics, although Brown suggests the German chancellor overcame her natural reserve by “perhaps unintentionally” cultivating an image as “Mutti” — the mother of the nation.

Brown has another excuse: that he was too Scottish. “The year 2007 may prove to have been the last year in which a Scot became prime minister of the United Kingdom,” he writes. He may be right, although the popularity of Ruth Davidson, the pugnacious Scottish Tory leader, may soon test his theory.

But this all masks a simpler reason for Brown’s ultimate failure as prime minister. Months passed as media cheerleaders and MPs waited for him to set out his own left-of-centre agenda, the one supposedly suppressed by Blair. But Brown’s late-night endeavours in Downing Street often seemed to generate little more than promises to provide “British jobs for British workers”, a plan to fly Union flags from public buildings and a scheme to “deep clean” hospitals.

He says his own “biggest regret” was failing to convince the British people that his progressive politics were the best response to the crash, not the decade of austerity ushered in by Cameron’s victory at the 2010 election. Brown insists Labour did not borrow and spend too much before the crash and that it was only his poor communication skills that failed to persuade the public to buy his “Labour investment versus Tory cuts” narrative. Those in the bunker recall that the principal problem was not a lack of communication but the lack of a plan.

For those hoping to discover why he arrived in Number 10 so unprepared, Brown’s book gives little away: his soul-searching only goes so deep. He revives his claim that Blair broke the “explicit, but private understanding” that he would leave Number 10 some time in his second term, keeping Brown waiting, his political potency fading over time.

In other places Brown seems in denial and he fails to shine new light on some of the most controversial episodes of his career, such as the so-called “curry house plot” in 2006 by allies, who quit en masse to put pressure on Blair. Brown, a master of political intrigue, denies that he had knowledge of the plot: “I helped to put the rebellion down,” he says.

Readers are invited to believe that one reason Brown abandoned his plan for a snap election in 2007 was not because he bottled it, but because he discovered at the last minute that Labour could not afford to campaign. “I now found, to my dismay, that I had inherited a party organisation where the parlous state of our finances put us one step away from insolvency,” he writes.

Although such accounts are frustrating, there is also a sense that perhaps Brown is being a little too harsh on himself overall. He claims he was the wrong prime minister for a social media age — but he was undoubtedly the right person, at the right time, to deal with the financial crash of 2008. And while Brown accepts some criticism for failing to regulate the City more effectively while chancellor, he rose to the challenge of dealing with the crash and it gave his premiership a hitherto missing purpose; his marshalling of an international response at the London G20 summit in April 2009 will go down as his finest hour. “We may have saved the world from a second great depression,” he says.

His decade at the Treasury was marked by strong growth and two momentous decisions — the creation of an independent Bank of England and the thwarting of Blair’s attempt to take Britain into the euro. “My relationship with Tony never really recovered,” he writes. Brown admits to mistakes as chancellor, not least the ill-fated decision to abolish the 10p income tax rate, but his tenure was also accompanied by the establishment of a national minimum wage and a vast renewal of Britain’s public realm.

The “clunking iron fist” is also surprisingly generous towards those with whom he clashed repeatedly during his time in politics, including Alistair Darling, his chancellor, and even occasionally to Blair himself, noting that their political relationship spanned 24 momentous and generally productive years in opposition and in government.

And Brown still had one last big shot in his locker. Four years after leaving Number 10, Scotland appeared to be edging towards independence when he stirred from his lair on the banks of the Forth on the eve of the country’s referendum. I was there in the hall in the Maryhill district of Glasgow when Brown took to the stage to address the bedraggled army of pro-union campaigners, haggard after weeks of abuse and being told they were not “true Scots”. Brown was shaking with intensity. “Hold your head high,” he growled.

“Let us tell the nationalists this is not their flag, their country, their culture, their streets.” The thunder in his voice was subsumed by rapturous applause in the old Victorian hall. Brown’s book is a reminder of just how frustrating he could be. But as his Maryhill speech proved, when he was good, he was very good indeed.

My Life, Our Times , by Gordon Brown, Bodley Head, RRP£25, 512 pages

George Parker is the FT’s political editor

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Photograph: Camera Press/R Stonehouse