Gordon Brown: Prime Minister

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 blindness than we realise … Through an over-concentration on trivialities, they have lost sight of the things that really matter.’

Any trace of his son’s dilettantism was expunged. After six months in hospital, there was relief that one eye was saved. The left, dead eye permanently changed Brown’s appearance. His smile no longer triggered the normal facial muscles, gradually creating a slightly dour expression. At the time he spoke of the operation as a success, but he would tell a friend years later, ‘The operation was botched. Everyone can make mistakes.’ He particularly recalled the surgeon’s quip, ‘Well Gordon, we’ll have another bash.’

In spring 1968 he courageously resumed his studies and re-engaged in university life. The seventeen-year-old self-consciously hid any suggestion of impairment and the psychological consequences of six months’ darkness. Compared to the shy fresher introduced by his brother to Jonathan Wills as a potential contributor to the student newspaper, Brown now displayed more self-confidence than previously. Propelled by a single-minded lust for success, in one way he resembled Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman: ‘He had the only dream you can have – to come out number-one man.’ In effect, Brown sought control over others. Within weeks, most students at the university were conscious of an exceptional undergraduate in their midst.

The contrast between the outstanding student diligently pursuing his degree and the near squalor of his first home in the Grassmarket, just behind Edinburgh Castle, and later his second, larger home in Marchmont Road, entered the university’s folklore. At first the rooms at 48 Marchmont Road were shared with six or seven other students as a statutory tenant, but after fifteen years he would buy them for a bargain price. With some pride Brown would confirm his chronic untidiness, retelling a story of a policeman reporting a burglary at his flat. ‘I have never seen such mindless vandalism in thirty years in the force,’ said the police officer of the chaos. Brown surveyed the scene. ‘It looks quite normal to me,’ he replied. Those sharing his flat tolerated not only the anarchy but also one unusual tenant who one afternoon caught a burglar entering through the skylight. Instead of calling the police she invited the intruder to stay, for an affair lasting several weeks. Her room was subsequently occupied by Andrew, Gordon’s younger brother, a keen party host. Those who ever voiced a suspicion that Andrew was riding on his elder brother’s achievements were promptly cautioned. ‘Please don’t hurt me by criticising Andrew,’ Brown once told Owen Dudley Edwards, his university tutor. ‘Criticise me, but not Andrew.’

Politics was his passion, and his political stance was set in concrete. He joined the Labour Party in 1969, and while growing his hair long, ignored the fashionable far left, refusing to join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) or to join the movement for greater Scottish independence following the discovery of oil in the North Sea. He was never seen smoking pot or uncontrollably drunk, even as the host of his frequent parties. The dozens who regularly crowded into the flat to drink beer and eat dry cubes of cheese at the end of toothpicks, influenced by the turbulence in England during the sixties, fashioned themselves ‘The Set’, convinced that they were destined to change the world, and particularly Scotland. No one could accuse Brown of conducting himself like Adam Morris, the ambitious undergraduate played by Tom Conti in the successful 1970s television dramatisation of Frederic Raphael’s novel The Glittering Prizes. But the more self-important of his elegant friends – like Wilf Stevenson, who hosted dinner parties – and those who joined Brown at the cinema, theatre and particularly the Abbotsford pub just south of Princes Street, regarded themselves even if inaccurately as Edinburgh’s equivalent of the Bloomsbury set, noisily quoting artists, writers and politicians. Even during his absence from those meetings, Brown’s ghost was present. ‘People liked being around him,’ recalled Madeline Arnot, a guest at his flat. ‘Everyone liked talking to him. He was at the centre of everything.’ While ‘The Set’ cast themselves in an unspoken competition as society’s future movers and shakers, the city’s working class – as remote from the students as the Eskimos – classed the boisterous elite as a gaggle of Hooray Henrys. By any measure, they were neither a golden nor a doomed generation.

The routine presence at these parties in 1970 of Princess Margarita of Romania, the eldest daughter of the exiled king, enhanced that image. Good-looking, charming and intelligent, Margarita had been introduced to Brown by John Smythe, one of the six people sharing his flat. Heads turned, it was said, whenever Margarita, of French, Greek and Romanian parentage, with a pedigree derived from the Habsburgs, Romanovs and Hohenzollerns, entered a room. The modest student of sociology and politics, who spoke English with a middle-class accent, hid her real background. Her family’s small home was near Lake Geneva, but thanks to her friendships with the king and queen of Spain, the exiled king of Greece, and Europe’s minor royalty, she was accustomed to living in mansions and palaces across the continent. Since their backgrounds were so different, Brown’s attraction to the ‘Red Princess’, as she became known, puzzled many. Some of Brown’s flatmates, who like him were becoming increasingly politically active, were irritated by the gilt-edged invitations arriving through the letterbox just as their flat was becoming the centre of a revolution. He offered no explanation when she moved into his bedroom. His silence reflected his Scottish respect for her privacy and, more importantly, his belief that intimacies were not public property. Friends, however, understood the attraction. Margarita’s looks and character were exceptional and, more important, compared to Katie, the English county girl whom Brown had been dating, she was unusually supportive. Unlike British girls, Margarita was accustomed to women offering compassion and encouragement to their men, which precisely matched Brown’s requirements. She provided maternal care, acting like a mother hen, worrying about the health of his remaining eye, deciding what he should eat (usually tuna and lettuce sandwiches), wear (the same tweed and flannels), and occasionally do. ‘He’s too busy to wash up,’ Margarita told their flatmates after the jolly communal breakfasts. Dressed in a pink nightdress, she insisted that Gordon’s life’s work was too important to be distracted by domesticities. Her pedigree had given her experience and toleration beyond her years. Her enjoyment of making decisions on his behalf appealed to a man who disliked annoying friends and who was reluctant to cause upset. But the princess would also roar in his face if his Presbyterian obduracy became irksome, deflating the pompous Fife boy.

Those who would subsequently criticise Brown for favouring intense hard work at the cost of human relationships would not have recognised him during those early months of the relationship. Margarita’s misfortune was that her boyfriend’s prevalent feminine influences were his mother and the absence of a sister. His loyalty to the ultra-conventional woman of the manse required some disguise of his lifestyle. During a visit to the flat in Edinburgh, Elizabeth Brown found some items of female underwear in the bathroom. ‘I don’t know how they got there,’ exclaimed Brown with embarrassment. ‘They must have come by mistake from the laundry.’ In turn, his mother would be untroubled by his bachelorhood until, she confided to a friend, he met someone whom she could approve. Out of a sense of duty towards his parents, he agreed to a mixture of concealment and denial. Margarita faced other hurdles. Despite her unsnobbish charm, she found difficulty in supplanting the male culture of Brown’s circle. Sport was intrinsic to Brown’s life. Regularly he met a large group of friends, including many from his school, on the terraces at Murrayfield for rugby internationals or at club grounds for local football and rugby matches. Margarita was not invited. She was also excluded from his daily discussions and plots with his student allies about politics. In his second year at university he was elected chairman of the Labour Club, was the editor of the student newspaper, and was regularly sitting at the same desk in the university library, working so hard without coffee breaks that Madeline Arnot, who became a Cambridge don, later thanked him for her good degree. ‘I followed him as a role model,’ she later volunteered. Others followed Brown, albeit still a teenager, as a political leader.

In 1970, aged nineteen, disappointed like so many to have missed out on the student revolt witnessed in other cities such as Paris, he spotted an opportunity to assert student power in his own kingdom. The issue was whether the investments owned by Edinburgh University included shares in South African companies, a taboo for those seeking to destroy apartheid. The vice-chancellor Sir Michael Swann, a respected member of the Tory establishment and thus an easy man for Brown to dislike, stated publicly that the university did not invest in ‘companies known to be active in the support of apartheid’, but documents leaked to Brown by a disgruntled university administrator showed that in fact the university owned shares in many companies active in South Africa, including the mining company de Beers, which had been accused of unacceptable employment practices. Working from the student newspaper office, Brown composed a special news sheet exposing the university’s deception, electrifying the university’s community.

By accident rather than design, Brown found that midway through his studies he was leading a revolution, without realising the possible repercussions. Edinburgh’s establishment was a tight clique. Every lunchtime there was a procession of the city’s great and good from the university, financial institutions and government offices to the New Club. Their midday discussions during those days did not focus on censuring Swann for his deception, but expressed their apoplexy about the challenge to their authority by an upstart student posing as a symbol of integrity against a foreign impostor. In the long term the confrontation harmed Brown, but in the midst of the dispute his disarming manner towards the ruling class shone as a virtue.

By contrast to many of the ‘revolutionary’ students protesting in the 1960s across Britain and other parts of Europe and North America, Brown’s politics were reasoned and principled. He adhered to Labour’s traditional values. Unlike many students, he did not succumb to the emotional appeals of the Govan shipbuilders during their confrontation with Edward Heath’s government in 1971 over the closure of their yard; in fact he predicted the shipworkers’ ultimate failure. In an article for the student newspaper he criticised the ‘alternative society seekers, Trotskyite students and liberal documentary makers’ who had visited the Upper Clyde shipyards: ‘The trendies are looking in vain for their kind of revolution. While they may plan the final end of capitalism, the mass meetings, the George Square demos and the fighting talk of the stewards should not belie the real campaign on the Clyde; for this is a work-in not for workers’ control, but an attempt to save jobs, and not a demand for the abolition of private ownership.’ His analysis was probably correct, but his political inexperience blinded him to the machinations between the trade unions and the government. To his surprise, in 1972 Heath capitulated and agreed to invest in the doomed yard. Many aspiring politicians learnt from Heath’s humiliation, including Margaret Thatcher. Brown learnt the lesson twenty years later. His ragged journey to that eventual wisdom, understanding the art of political strategy and intrigue, started soon after he achieved a first class degree in history in 1972. Some would say that his was the best first ever awarded by the university.

Aged twenty-one, he embarked upon a doctorate about the Labour Party in Scotland which gradually developed over the following decade of research and writing into ‘The Labour Party and Political Change in Scotland 1918–29’. Originally he intended to explain the two-hundred-year development of labour from the seventeenth century to the emergence from the trade unions of the Labour Party in the twentieth century. His eventual thesis, less ambitiously, described Labour’s struggle to establish itself as the alternative to the Conservatives. In the course of his research he became entranced by the romanticism of Scotland’s heroic socialist pioneers – Keir Hardie, Robert Smillie, John Maclean, Willie Gallacher, John Wheatley – striving against capitalism to build the perfect society. In particular he alighted on James Maxton, a Presbyterian orator with spellbinding powers, preaching about socialism’s Promised Land. Maxton, the son of a Presbyterian headmaster closely involved in the Church, was MP for the Bridgeton seat in Glasgow from 1922 until his death in 1946. ‘He was a politician,’ wrote the great historian A.J.P. Taylor, ‘who had every quality – passion, sincerity, unstinted devotion, personal charm, a power of oratory – every quality save one – the gift of knowing how to succeed.’ In Brown’s words, Maxton, a crusading rather than a career politician, ‘had sought to make socialism the common sense of his age’. His Christian desire to promote human happiness and equality bore similarities to the sermons of the Reverend John Brown. During those years researching his PhD, Brown sought to learn from Maxton’s mistakes: the consequence of splits within a party and the occasional advantage in politics of being feared rather than loved. Scotland, he understood, produced two types of socialist – the romantic and the pragmatic. The ideal was to be the pragmatic inspired by the romantic. His test-bed was the campaign to embarrass Sir Michael Swann.