I blame those who worked with Brown, knew what he was really like, but stayed silent
‘How the Guardianistas changed their tune,’ was the heading to a Sunday Times factbox published in the paper last weekend. The intention was to mock those Fleet Street columnists, erstwhile fans of Gordon Brown, who have turned against their former hero. ‘Only five more dreaming days until Gordon Brown’s coronation,’ the famously independent-minded and fiercely left-of-centre Brown loyalist, Polly Toynbee, was quoted as having written a year ago. ‘Brown’s first month looks like a striking success,’ Jonathan Freedland, always a thoughtful and progressive voice, had written a month later. Hopeful, trusting voices, both.
No longer. ‘On current evidence he is simply not up to the job,’ thought Mr Freedland on 18 June this year. ‘It is not just Gordon Brown who looks like a dead man walking,’ remarked Ms Toynbee (13 June), ‘Labour now looks like a party of zombies.’ All good fun. Those who execute U-turns in British media commentary must expect the same mockery as awaits any politician who does the same, and both Toynbee and Freedland have broad enough shoulders to shrug off the abuse. Elsewhere in that newspaper Simon Jenkins widens the attack to include a range of commentators who ‘were euphoric at Brown’s advent a year ago’, and ‘now dismiss him as useless’. ‘They carried him to power on a chariot of golden expectation. Now he is down in the polls they beat him senseless... It is politics as horror-movie.’ It is, in short, becoming fashionable among journalists to chart — in tones of surprise and shock — the rapid turnaround in the Prime Minister’s reputation among the media and political class.
I was rather looking forward to joining the gleeful chorus. I never did think much of Brown because whenever he spoke one had the sniff of a man of limited courage or imagination: frightened, unadventurous and a bully. What fun it will be, I thought, to point the finger tomorrow and chant ‘I told you so’ at those who yesterday warned us that we must ‘never underestimate Gordon Brown’, and praised him as an intellectual colossus, master-strategist and political titan. When the editor of this magazine seriously recommended readers to take with us the Prime Minister’s book Courage, as beach-reading last summer, I made a little note in case it should prove useful in years to come. But now colleagues are changing their opinions I simply find myself admiring their honesty. For they have done and are doing exactly what a good journalist is supposed to do: report what appears to be the case. What appears to be the case has changed. So have their reports. This is nothing but professional.
It is not given to Polly, Jonathan, Matthew or me to live cheek-by-jowl with Gordon Brown; to know him as his mother knew him; to work with him as close colleagues have; or to peer through some window into his intellect, psyche or soul. The same is true of the great majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party, who know their leader hardly better than you or I do, and hardly could. Commentators, party workers, backbench MPs and political followers must rely for the most part on report.
The reports on Gordon Brown were almost universally favourable. Admittedly his occasional surliness was well-known, but those who met and talked with him generally described the then-Chancellor as a genial and clever man and pleasant conversationalist. We cannot doubt that this is what they saw. Added to the chattier sorts of report were those of a more serious kind: they described a formidable brain and powerhouse of ideas, a gritty and decisive politician.
My hunch that this might not quite be right was only that: a hunch. My hunches are often wrong. The hard evidence — unavoidably hearsay — stacked powerfully up against that hunch. On balance, and on the information available, going back over many years, there was only one reasoned and well-evidenced conclusion anyone could reach about Brown: that he was a politician of tremendous weight and stature with strong personal and moral qualities.
So I nod respectfully to those who reported as much, and raise my hat now to those who, observing that the picture has changed, describe the different scene.
More fruitful than sniggering at the contrast is to ask how the world of Westminster commentary came to be offered such a dud prospectus. What was the original source of this information?
I have to conclude that it was, in the first instance, Mr Brown himself. It was he — this supposedly ‘dour’ and ‘Presbyterian’ man — who recommended himself to friends and colleagues in such consistently generous terms. One begins to wonder whether, for all that we have derided Tony Blair as a confidence trickster, the master of confidence tricksters may turn out to have been his apparently understated successor. Men of few words are sometimes more successful at taking the world in than babblers, because their silences are thought to betoken depth.
It’s fair, then, to say that Britain (and its media commentary) is no more to blame for having overestimated Gordon Brown than is the boss who hires an employee on the basis of a fabricated CV. If someone claims to have a powerful grasp of politics, economics, philosophy and administration, to be strongminded and decisive, and to be on such close terms with the quality of courage as to have written a book about it, there is no public records office where we can check this. If, in addition, he has held the second highest office of state for a decade without obvious mishap, we are inclined to take it on trust.
But there is one further check we can make. We can ask very close colleagues: the two or three men or women who know him best. And Brown was always surrounded, like the King of Swaziland, by a tiny coterie of praise-singers.
Ed Balls has spent a decade testifying to his friend and master’s strengths. Charlie Whelan made it his life’s work. Tony Blair, whatever his private furies, never let slip that he thought his Chancellor weak and handed us happily over to him. John Hutton, if he really did say what he denies saying about Brown being an ‘effing disaster’, shut his mouth fast and thereafter kept it shut. Peter Mandelson came close to blurting it out, but seemed to recant. Alan Johnson said nothing, but sounded unconvinced. And from Alan Milburn, John Reid and Charles Clarke (at least until the whole world was voicing doubts) there was only a muted grumbling and occasional gossip, always denied. Thus did Mr Brown proceed to Downing Street without a single public challenge from within the great and often noble political movement that had produced him.
I believe that at least some of these men knew very well what would follow. Let me gently suggest that they have not done the electorate, nor their party, nor their own good names, any great service by their timidity. They have about four months to redeem themselves. They have little to lose, and their souls to regain.
Matthew Parris is a columnist for the Times.
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