Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown: The Man Who Was Right in a Crisis

In the second week of October 2008, with the Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS days from collapse, the British government did something no other government had yet dared: it injected equity directly into its banks and guaranteed their debt. Within days Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, told American readers that Brown and his Chancellor "have defined the character of the worldwide rescue effort, with other wealthy nations playing catch-up." It was the best week of Gordon Brown's political life, and it came less than two years before the voters turned him out.

A Manse in Kirkcaldy

Born on 20 February 1951 in Giffnock, the son of a Church of Scotland minister, Brown was three when the family moved to Kirkcaldy in Fife, the town that would define him as thoroughly as any politician is defined by a place. He was academically precocious to an almost freakish degree, entering the University of Edinburgh at sixteen. A rugby injury during his student years cost him the sight of his left eye; surgery saved the right. He took a history degree in 1972, went on to a doctorate in the subject, and was elected Rector of the university, an early sign of the appetite for organisation that would carry him through Labour's long opposition.

The Longest Chancellorship

Brown entered Parliament in 1983 as MP for Dunfermline East, sharing an office with a fellow new arrival named Tony Blair. He reached the Shadow Cabinet by 1987. When John Smith died suddenly in 1994, Brown stood aside for Blair rather than split the modernising wing of the party, on terms the two men disputed for the rest of their careers.

After the 1997 landslide he became Chancellor of the Exchequer and stayed a decade, the longest serving in modern British history. His first act was the boldest: handing the Bank of England independent control of interest rates, removing from ministers a power they had guarded for three centuries. He held to inherited Conservative spending limits before opening the taps on public services. On the euro he built an elaborate procedural fortress, the Five Economic Tests, and used it to rule out British membership in 1997, in 2003 and again in 2007. Harvard's Institute of Politics credits his Treasury with presiding over "the longest ever period of growth" while making the Bank independent and delivering agreements to support the world's poorest countries.

The Wait

He became Prime Minister on 27 June 2007, promising a more sober and down-to-earth tone of government after a decade of Blair. The honeymoon was short. Within months he had allowed speculation about a snap general election to build and then declined to call one, a decision that cost him a reputation for decisiveness he never entirely recovered.

Autumn 2008

Then the banking system began to fail, and the qualities that made Brown a poor television performer became briefly the most valuable in Europe. Working with Alistair Darling, he assembled a rescue that eventually committed £137 billion to the banks and, crucially, chose recapitalisation over the American strategy of buying up toxic mortgage securities. Krugman's verdict was that the British government "has shown itself willing to think clearly about the financial crisis, and act quickly on its conclusions," going "straight to the heart of the problem" while Washington hesitated for ideological reasons. Brown then took the argument global, convening the London Summit of the G20 in April 2009; Harvard's IOP credits him with "preventing a second great depression through his negotiation of the global deal" there. At home his government passed the Climate Change Act of 2008, the first legislation of its kind in the world, and the Equality Act of 2010. He ended Britain's combat mission in Iraq in 2009 and reinforced Afghanistan, working with a Washington that found him considerably less congenial than it had found his predecessor.

The Election He Lost

None of it saved him. Labour lost 91 seats in May 2010. Brown denied the Conservatives a majority but could not build a coalition of his own; when the Liberal Democrats went the other way he resigned on 12 May. He left with his private life already marked by loss: his daughter Jennifer Jane, born prematurely in December 2001, had died on 7 January 2002, eleven days old. He and Sarah Macaulay, whom he married in August 2000, went on to have two sons.

Why Gordon Is Called a Genius

The case for Brown is unusually well documented, because a Nobel laureate in economics made it in public at the moment it mattered. Krugman's October 2008 column did not merely approve of the British rescue; it argued that Brown's officials were the only ones in the Western world reasoning correctly, and concluded: "Gordon Brown and his officials are making sense. And they may have shown us the way through this crisis." The quality being praised is specific and worth naming precisely. It is not eloquence or charisma, both of which Brown conspicuously lacked. It is analytical speed under maximum uncertainty: the ability to identify, in a matter of days and against enormous institutional resistance, that the binding constraint was bank capital rather than asset prices, and then to act on that conclusion before the argument had been won.

The counter-case is equally clear and Brown's own career supplies it. A man who thinks fast is not necessarily a man who can lead, and Brown proved repeatedly that he could not do the political part of the job. The election that was speculated about and never called, the chronic feuding with Blair that began with a disputed conversation in 1994, the flat public manner, the loss of 91 seats: these are not incidental. There is also an uncomfortable chronology. The Chancellor who diagnosed the crash so quickly in 2008 had run the Treasury for the entire decade of the boom that produced it. Brown's admirers and detractors are, in a sense, describing the same man from different distances.

Legacy

An independent Bank of England, the world's first Climate Change Act, the Equality Act, and a template for bank rescue that most of the developed world copied within a fortnight: Brown's institutional legacy is larger than his three years in Downing Street would suggest, and most of it was built when he was not Prime Minister. He remains the rare British politician whose reputation rests less on what he said than on what he calculated, and whose finest hour was measured in days.

Achievements

• Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer (1992–1997)
• Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury (1987–1989)
• Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (2007–2010)
• Leader of the Labour Party (2007–2010)
• Order of the Companions of Honour — 2024
• Educated at University of Edinburgh and Kirkcaldy High School