A Prudent Background
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
K:/Books/1108jw/0470846976/ch01/text_s/c01.3d CHAPTER ONE A prudent background ordon Brown’s father, in common with many members of his Ggeneration, had been horrified by the levels of unemployment and the degree of poverty that prevailed in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. He welcomed the election of the Attlee Labour government in 1945. His second son, James Gordon Brown, was born on 20 February 1951, eight months before the second Attlee government went down to defeat at the October 1951 General Election. The young Gordon’s formative years coincided with what Harold Wilson used to describe as ‘thirteen wasted years of Tory misrule’. His father, a Church of Scotland Minister, was not politically active but inculcated into his second son a strong sense of social justice and civic duty. ‘He taught me to treat everyone equally, and that is something I have not forgotten,’ the future Chancellor observed.1 As a son of the manse, Gordon Brown was also brought up with a strong sense of the Protestant work ethic. Many Labour supporters were to be surprised in later years by the impression that, having poured scorn on the Conservatives in opposition, Brown seemed to accept much of the ‘Thatcherite Settlement’. The explanation is that, while there was certainly such a thing as ‘society’ in his Scottish upbringing, there was also an emphasis on those famous Victorian values of self-reliance and self-improvement that were an integral element in what became known as ‘Thatcherism’. On Brown’s Presbyterian obsession with the work ethic, a biographer has commented, ‘He honestly believes that K:/Books/1108jw/0470846976/ch01/text_s/c01.3d THE PRUDENCE OF MR GORDON BROWN work is good for the soul, which should mean that his own is in no danger.’2 In the manse where he was brought up, prudence was indeed celebrated as one of the cardinal virtues. In years to come, those who came into contact professionally with Gordon Brown were to be impressed by the sense of industriousness that accompanied his prudent approach to life. The fact that he himself recalls a somewhat carefree childhood, in which the pursuit of the football ranked higher than the pursuit of his studies, is not inconsistent with his predisposition to hard work. In common with many highly gifted children and teenagers, he seems in those days to have displayed an air of ‘effortless superiority’ ^ not, in the pejorative sense, of looking down on lesser mortals, but in the way he could be obsessed by games and still produce first-class results in the examination hall. While not as precocious as John Stuart Mill ^ it was children’s books that he was memorising at the age of four, rather than Greek or Latin verse ^ the young Gordon, with his voracious appetite for ‘sums’, prompted one of his primary school teachers to recall, ‘I couldn’t keep Gordon in work. I was always having to give him more to do.’3 He proceeded from Kirkcaldy West (primary school) to Kirkcaldy High School. His academic brilliance coincided with a ‘forcing house’ experiment in the Scottish education system, which found him having to choose his future specialisation at the age of 12 (history) and going to university at 16, an age that, even at the time, he thought was too young. But the alternative was an extra year at school doing the same syllabus ^ after two years when he had proved everything he needed to with outstanding examination results. One of the defining traits of the ‘new’ Labour government of which Brown was to become such a powerful member was its obsession with ‘the media’. Gordon Brown’s interest in politics and the media date from his childhood, and in due course his main job before he embarked on a full-time political career was in the media. His own media ‘work experience’ began when he was nine, as sports reporter for his elder brother John’s handwritten Local News.At11 he was ‘sports editor’ for John Brown’s Gazette. 20 K:/Books/1108jw/0470846976/ch01/text_s/c01.3d A PRUDENT BACKGROUND The following year politics and the media were merging in the 12 year-old Gordon’s life. The enterprising Brown brothers were now calling their very local publication, Scotland’s Only Newspaper in Aid of the Freedom from Hunger Campaign. The Chancellor-in-the-making wrote an article predicting that ‘this year’ (1963) might be the Conservatives’ ‘last in office for a long time’.4 Harold Macmillan, at 69, was too old for the ‘responsible job’ of Prime Minister. Then came the 12 year-old’s early manifesto: ‘We should and must have a strong and reliable government, to promote our interests in Europe and the world. In Britain, too, we must have a less casual government that must take drastic measures in solving our unemployment, economic, transport and local government problems.’5 The boy’s concern about unemployment was father to the man’s obsession with ‘Welfare to Work’. There was also an early hint of the concept of ‘shared sovereignty’ and recognition that Britain needed to be part of a wider group: ‘Not long ago we were looked upon as a strong country: now our only hope of survival, in an age dominated by nuclear power, is to link with our stronger Western allies.’6 Brown was the undoubted ‘success’ of the school forcing system, although he said himself that ‘at 16 I had more problems than I had years’ and he felt a strong sense of unfairness about the way many other ‘guinea pigs’ fell by the wayside. ‘They pushed people too hard,’ he said. ‘The ignominy and rejection of failure (sic) could have been avoided.’ At 16 he was arguing for ‘respect for every individual’s freedom and identity, and the age-long quality of caring’.7,8 But at this stage no one was accusing him of being dour, or obsessed with work to the exclusion of play. A classmate recalled: ‘The whole school was an intellectual hot house at that time. But in our class, it was Gordon who set the pace, and the rest of us would do our best to keep up ... socially, as well as academically. He was so sharp. The banter and wisecracking that would go on between the boys was great. Gordon was always the quickest to come out with a funny line and would soon have the rest of us doubled over in laughter.’9 As Chancellor, Gordon Brown has persistently given the impression of being a man in a hurry, as well as a man with a mission. He can be 21 K:/Books/1108jw/0470846976/ch01/text_s/c01.3d THE PRUDENCE OF MR GORDON BROWN impatient to the point of giving offence ^ a characteristic which, when manifested during meetings in Brussels, can feed suspicions of euroscepticism. But he often metes out the same treatment to his colleagues in the Cabinet, and I have personally seen him occupy himself with something completely different while ostensibly hosting one of his seminars at Number 11 Downing Street. We shall see later that ‘something happened’ to him in 1992^94, when the shock of the election defeat of 1992 ^ the election the Tories should have lost ^ was followed by the death of John Smith in 1994 and the surge of support for Tony Blair in preference to Brown as Party leader. The darker, more complex Gordon Brown was not much in evidence during what were, at times, his riotous student days at Edinburgh University; neither did he appear to have a reputation for brusqueness in his early days in the Commons, from 1983. But in years to come many people who encountered him were to discover a complicated, brooding, even saturnine figure. His young brother Andrew has described him as having a ‘shy’ trait. To those with whom he feels relaxed he can be hugely entertaining company; and when he tries he can make very witty speeches to large audiences. But it undoubtedly suited him to cultivate a ‘dour’ image after 1992. There were two experiences in his student days that may partly serve to explain characteristics that were magnified by events in the 1990s. The first and most painful experience was his discovery, within days of arriving at Edinburgh University to read history, that a rugby injury earlier that year (1967) was causing him to lose the sight of his left eye. Within the next few years he also suffered a detached retina in his right eye. This eye was saved thanks to the latest laser technology, learnt in America by an Asian eye surgeon, Dr Hector Chowla, head of the eye department at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. ‘The clue to Gordon Brown,’ said a Labour Party insider, ‘is that he is naturally worried about losing his good eye. He is a politician in a hurry.’ James Naughtie has noted: ‘Everyone who knows him well recognises that his single-mindedness and relentless determination must in part be attributed to that trial in his late teens. For them, it explains elements in his character which sometimes 22 K:/Books/1108jw/0470846976/ch01/text_s/c01.3d A PRUDENT BACKGROUND seem impenetrable to outsiders.’10 It is interesting to note that his right eye was saved by a union of the health service and American technology. He was to preserve a close interest in the health service, and his Chancellorship was to be marked by a persistent search for new ideas from the USA. His first (October 1967) term at Edinburgh was dominated by the vain attempts to save his left eye.