While still a student he was elected rector of the university. He was the student radical who exposed the university's shameful investments in apartheid South Africa - and ended them. This gave you some sense of his presence.īy sheer brain power and personality, he dominated any situation he was in. One told me when I was writing his biography: 'He was good to everybody, and everybody wanted to know Gordon Brown.' Not even a rugby injury that cost the sight of his left eye and almost left him blind deterred him.Ĭontemporaries described him as 'hugely popular, a natural politician: totally selfassured'. Born in 1951, precociously bright, he went to Edinburgh University at 16. It's not as if he's ever hidden his light under a bushel.įrom his boyhood in Kirkcaldy, Fife, James Gordon Brown was a child of his time and place. He just got on with making the country in his own image. It is a wonderful reversal of fortunes that the poll loser is the strategic winner. No wonder his hard-line MPs froth with rage. He vilified the Brown manifesto while signing up to it. He had to pledge to large-scale public spending, against their slash 'n' burn instincts. He had to embrace the Brown vision, to promise not to attack the NHS and frontline public services. He can't reverse the good Gordon did for pensioners, for working families, for the health service, for the education system, for the economy and so much else. I suspect that's because he realises he can't just tear up the Brown legacy and dump it. But his influence lingers on.ĭavid Cameron affects to despise our outgoing Prime Minister.

Gordon Brown has stuck to it all his life.

The Scots stuck to that view in last week's election. He inherited it from his father in a Scottish manse, from the kirk that shaped his childhood and from the Labour Party north of the border that has a steady, levelling perspective of society. And no one ever talked about 'Brownism' - because he achieved his social vision by degrees, with few noticing. He redistributed wealth by stealth.Ĭommentators talk a lot about Blairism, but there was no such thing because Tony didn't have a world picture.

Old folk, mothers, workers, the middle class, young people - they've all something to thank him for. But we have all gained from the velvet-gloved revolution that he wrought in society. His tragic flaw was he couldn't change himself. He changed Labour and changed the country. We are only now beginning to understand the scale of his achievement as he leaves the highest office in the land. They dare not even try, for fear of enraging the nation. He shaped a post-Thatcher consensus that made Britain a fairer place, a settlement the Tories admit they cannot undo overnight. Gordon Brown brought decency and honesty back into public life, and his political legacy is the greatest of any Labour leader since Clem Attlee.

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