5 JULY 1997, Page 22

For you, too, Gordon?

HOW topical. Zenith Publishers have sent me the autobiography of Gordon Brown. I never knew that he was in the excavator business. From modest beginnings, he built up Brown Group International to turn over £160 million and quite a lot of Yorkshire. His company overtraded, bought a bankrupt supplier in Norway, bought a jet to go and see it, bought some more jets, started its own airline, and when times turned hard relied for its finance on Drexel Burnham Lambert. Then the receivers moved in. Unlucky, Mr Brown thinks. Now he has drawn on Hemingway to give his book a saucy title: We Moved the Earth. I suppose its author may be (so to speak) another Gordon Brown but it does seem to me that one of them is quite enough.