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Round table discussions: the MakeSpace Youth Cabinet at Number 10 recently putting the PM straight on what government can do to help young people |
Dawn of a new Gordon Age
Books about the new Prime Minister are fairly thin on the ground as yet but two biographies offer contrasting views of the man who has spent 10 years in the wings, writes Geoffrey Goodman
Gordon Brown: Prime Minister.
By Tom Bower. Harper Perennial £8.99.
Gordon Brown: Past, Present and Future.
By Francis Beckett. Haus Books £10. 99.
THESE are still early days yet it is hard to ignore the feeling that British political life has entered a quite new phase.
In fact it sometimes seems that there has been a general election with a change of government displacing the previous decade of Tony Blair’s regime.
Within weeks of this change it is already evident that the tectonic plates have shifted and we are living in a different political culture – the period of Gordon Brown has opened a new chapter. There is an instinctive feel in the air that things are different.
Yet here is a man who has spent 10 years as Chancellor of the Exchequer – longer in that office than any other since the 19th century – and a man whom we had come to regard as a humourless figure, albeit brilliant at his job though demonstrably without the charisma to charm the voters, as Blair once did.
But despite all these earlier assessments the public perception is now changing. Gordon Brown is seen as a man of substance almost a different person from that fellow who was Chancellor over the past decade.
It has been an impressively promising start to say the least.
Now, of course, all this poses problems for a number of our contemporary biographers who have spent the past few years telling us what a strange, unattractive fellow the Chancellor is and how unsuitable he would be as Blair’s successor. Among these, the outstandingly critical one came in 2004 from that master executioner, Tom Bower.
This has now been updated into a paperback edition with two additional chapters and more than 20,000 words of rewriting and amending – though not softening.
In his original text nearly three years ago, Bower reluctantly and paradoxically concluded that Gordon Brown “probably and deservedly” would succeed in becoming Prime Minister. Yet there was never any doubt in Bower’s analysis that in terms of the national interest it would be a mistaken elevation.
There is nothing in the new version which suggests that Bower has revised his view
In fact, in the updated additional two chapters one senses that this biographer is biting his lip, and his pen, at having to concede that his subject is now in Number 10. In his book’s penultimate sentence Bower writes: “Few of his [Brown’s] predecessors had entered that office [Number 10] with more experience, or with greater liabilities.”
Such a flat, dismissive and uninspiring conclusion sums up what is a seriously disappointing book from such an immensely skilled biographer.
It reinforces the view I took when Bower’s original book was published: that he was the wrong man to write a biography of Brown.
Bower’s immense skills are incontrovertible but his speciality is as a master of the “killer biography”. He seizes his victims by the throat until they confess their guilt. He was merciless in his treatment of subjects such as Robert Maxwell [two biographies], Sir Richard Branson, Tiny Rowland, Mohammed Fayed and, more recently, Conrad Black.
It was never quite clear to me why Bower [or his publishers] were drawn to the subject of Gordon Brown unless it was to provide a demolition job.
One can only offer sympathy to the writer – whom I admire for his special skills as a brilliant researcher – but even more so to the subject.
The Francis Beckett biography is quite different in every sense – style, greater fluency, and with a sympathy toward Gordon Brown’s political agenda while not glossing over his flaws.
Essentially, Beckett’s book is an extended essay on the life and times of Gordon Brown which doesn’t claim to reveal any hidden secrets but presents a fair and reasoned analysis along with an optimistic prediction of what he might achieve as Prime Minister.
Beckett is particularly effective in his readiness to appreciate the achievements of this introverted son of the manse – his father John Brown was a Presbyterian minister in Scotland who brought up his two sons to recognise their lifelong mission and duty must be to serve the community.
Gordon Brown’s inner psychological struggle has always been to try to put his father’s teaching into practical political form.
Beckett has produced not only an altogether warmer understanding of why Gordon Brown is what he is – it is also a readable story. It is true that Beckett’s book doesn’t have the research gravitas of the Bower biography with its surgical and often ruthless critical detail. But Bower’s version falls seriously short of a balanced judgment.
In fact the Brown biography industry, like the Blair industry, is still in its infancy.
I predict that in time someone will write a truly splendid biography of a man who promises to be a most interesting and perhaps surprisingly successful Prime Minister.
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