.png)
1 hour ago
3
It’s a Monday in August and as England burns in dystopian heat, Gordon Brown and I are in his office at the top of his house in North Queensferry, overlooking the moody waters of the Firth of Forth. It’s hard to recall the top of my own sauna-like house in London as we stand here in the cool, wearing wool suits and necessary socks, my coat slung over the back of a chair. “I was watching Raith Rovers – the local football team – on Saturday,” Brown says, “and it was really cold. There was a wind blowing in from the sea.” He asks if I’ve heard the famous joke – “Scotland’s only got two seasons: July and winter”– then chuckles. It’s one of his favourites. (I’ll hear him tell it three times today.)
That’s not to say Fife has been untouched by the multiple heatwaves. They had a few sunny days. One hit 24C – “a shock”, Brown says, July temperatures typically being 15-17C. He stood in his kitchen and considered the modest patch of grass at the back of the house. “I never imagined being out in the garden in the summer. I never imagined it because it’s either raining or too cold.” Once out, he found himself battling a “very dangerous” nest of wasps. One family member was stung, then there was the rigmarole of specialists in thick gloves and protective suits undertaking its removal. By the time that was done, the sun had gone in.
Climate is something we will discuss today, it being something of a wasps’ nest. Also: Donald Trump, Europe, Andy Burnham and the Labour party. The former prime minister (2007-2010) and longest-serving chancellor of the exchequer in modern history (1997-2007) will touch on Iraq, the financial crisis and Scottish independence. He will give his diagnosis of the current state of global politics, the focus of his new book, The Future Starts With Us.
What’s telling is how much people still want to hear his views – arguably far more than any of the six broken PMs since (tickets for his forthcoming book events in Bath and Edinburgh sold out in minutes). Many feel we didn’t know how lucky we were with Brown and his old-school sense of duty. At the time we saw him as a brooding toad, a hangdog, grizzled pessimist, instead of prizing his gratitude and prudence. His father’s booming refrain was “Be thankful for what you have; you can cope with a lot less!” so perhaps it wasn’t surprising Brown did not cash in when he left No 10. Did not take a fat job in banking, a knighthood, or even the prime ministerial pension to which he’s entitled.
He’s aware that, as a political heavyweight, his views on Labour still count and that he has a reputation for micromanagement, so initially he’s careful when I ask about Burnham. “I don’t want to be a backseat driver,” he says, settling into a tub chair next to a wall of books (political biographies, political philosophy, a first edition Keynes). But can he help himself? No, he cannot. A second later he’s saying he “hopes” Burnham will heed a report he did for Keir Starmer recommending abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with an elected chamber “representative of all the regions and nations of the country, which fits in with Andy’s idea that the regions and the nations are going to have a bigger voice”.
He reminds me the Lords is an unelected chamber of about 800, “the second largest legislature in the world after China”. It’s packed to the Pugin rafters with lobbyists. The problem will be persuading them to vote to cut their own throats. “But something’s got to change.”
Brown calls Burnham “Andy”. He has known him a long time. Burnham’s first cabinet job was under Brown as chief secretary to the Treasury (later, he was health secretary in Brown’s government). Brown’s official role under Burnham is as an adviser overseeing the G20, which Britain hosts next year. He was brought in to do it by Starmer (remember the photo op of him going in to No 10 with Harriet Harman?), along with an overhaul of defence spending. Brown doesn’t deny that Burnham sought his advice before appointing Brown’s friend and former parliamentary private secretary John Healey as chancellor, but says, “My advice would’ve been not to take my advice.” (It’s the same line he used when journalists asked if he’d been advising Rachel Reeves.)
Not that he doesn’t have plenty of advice to give: “Look, the British economy was growing about 2.5% a year when I was chancellor, and now it’s growing about 1% a year. So I do believe, as I said to Andy, that the focus on Britain as an innovation nation is an important part of the solution to this growth deficit.”
Someone brings me a tea and Brown a glass of still water. He hasn’t had caffeine since he overdid it during the financial crisis in 2008, and recently gave up sparkling for “reasons of health”. (No joke, his rider for book events is tap water. An adviser adds, “And maybe a banana.”)
Since leaving office, Brown has popped his head above the parapet on specific issues: Brexit, antisemitism, universal credit. He is gravely concerned about the far right, more popular in Europe now than before fascists seized power in the 1930s. The number of truly liberal democracies has dropped to its lowest level in three decades – 29, he writes in his book. “Some fear we are approaching a moment comparable to the run-up to the second world war.”
Part of the issue is that the postwar rules-based order no longer exists. We have moved from a “unipolar” to a “multipolar” world in which leaders promote a sort of zero fucks nationalism – America First, Italy First, Russia First. “Putin feels he can ignore the rule of law with impunity,” Brown says. “Netanyahu feels the same. In my book, I’ve got quotes from each explicitly saying it’s all about power now. If you’ve got the power, you use it. It doesn’t matter what the morality of what you’re doing is. I’ve got Trump saying, ‘I decide what my morality is. I don’t take moral lectures from anybody.’”
This posturing is behind Putin and Netanyahu’s indiscriminate bloody slaughters in Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon, behind America’s devastating attacks on Iran (“hospitals and schools should never be subject to bombing in any war”). But also, Brown says, “America was not able to stop the invasion of Ukraine, even though they knew about it in advance. And the Americans are not telling the Israelis actually to respect the idea that Palestine should have sovereignty. When I was prime minister and Israel invaded Gaza in 2009, the Americans told them to get out and they left.”
Brown met Netanyahu a few times when the Israeli leader was finance minister and he was chancellor. “He’s changed dramatically,” Brown says, then corrects himself, because “he’s always been obsessed with Iran. For 20 years it’s been the country that he wanted to neutralise or destabilise. So I’m not surprised that he persuaded Trump to [bomb].”
But were seeds of these violations not sown with the Iraq war, which he supported with Tony Blair in 2003? “To some extent, the interventions in the years from 2000. You can go back to the Vietnam war, to be honest.”
He has long admitted he made a “mistake” with Iraq. He felt “misled” when he learned, through a document he saw after he left government, that the US knew Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction in 2002. Had he known, would he have resigned? “Yes. I would not have been able to support the government.”
Blair now sits on Trump’s Board of Peace. While it’s promoted as an alternative peacekeeping agency, Brown sees it as essentially a corporate exercise. Its founding document, Brown argues, is closer “to an international property developer under the guise of making peace”. I begin a question and he interrupts: “I know what you’re going to ask.” What? “About Tony Blair. I don’t want to talk about Tony Blair.”
In his book, Brown writes that the US “may” have a new president in 2028. Why “may” and not “will”, given the two-term limit? Does he believe there won’t be an election? “No, Trump’s never been against elections. He’s just against results he doesn’t like.” What might this mean for the UK-US relationship? “The thing about that is, no matter what you think of any individual, you’ve got to try and make it work. Keir Starmer, to his credit, tried. Andy Burnham will try. Nobody’s saying they are going to be soulmates. You want to make it work without the abandonment of any principle.”
Brown’s suggestion for dealing with the spiralling global chaos is to get back to a rules-based world ASAP, with an “updated” commitment to “the rule of law, democratic accountability, respect for human rights, freedom of assembly, international cooperation, humanitarian aid, environmental stewardship. People are angry,” he continues. “Rightly so, because things they took for granted have somehow been undermined.”
But he skates over the role played by social media in the darkening of the political discourse, except to say it’s a “shouting match without an umpire”. Tech bros are the pied pipers of our children’s attention, I say. He points to a local Facebook group, Love Kirkcaldy! which, to him, exemplifies the positive way people come together online. He stresses – and this is a big theme of his book – one answer to tackling issues in national politics and international geopolitics lies at home. We need to refocus on our local communities: “Stronger communities will give us a stronger resistance to extremism.”
The book is dedicated to the people of Kirkcaldy, where Brown is an active force. We visit the Cottage Family Centre, a charity of which he is patron that helps under-16s and their families. During Covid I visited one of the charity’s two sites. A volunteer said that, on hearing about two children who were sleeping on the floor, Brown had gone home and dismantled his sons’ bunkbed, returning to present it to her along with sheets. (She also said he attempted to make the beds, but bodged this so comprehensively that his protection team had to take over.)
Then there’s the local multibank charity he set up: warehouses that take donations of goods from 90 companies, including Amazon, then redistribute them to the poor. I ask if he feels conflicted, given Amazon is a notoriously appalling employer with no unions. It’s the only time he’s a little gruff with me. “My first priority is to see if we can alleviate poverty. If Amazon is prepared to help, we will work with Amazon. If other companies are prepared to help, we will work with them. Poverty has been really severe here.” He says they’ve probably turned over £250m worth of goods to people who really need them. “So for a small charity just starting off … ”
There’s also his work as a UN special envoy for global education. He tells me about going to see Gianni Infantino, the controversial president of Fifa, four years ago at the organisation’s HQ in Zurich with proposals of how to raise a billion dollars for global education through donations. “And you know the boardroom table is gold. There is a lot of conspicuous consumption on display.
“My only worry is we are not talking enough about my book,” Brown says when we are back in his protection team’s Range Rover. We are talking about the book, I stress. In fact, trying to get the interview back on track when Brown talks about the book is like wrestling a ball off Lionel Messi when he has the goal in sight.
Brown builds the book’s central argument on the idea of empathy (and there’s a certain irony in that Blair famously accused Brown of lacking emotional intelligence). “Empathy is a term that comes from Adam Smith, from The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” he says. “Smith called it sympathy, but now you’d call it empathy, which is to put yourself in other people’s shoes.” Smith recognises that loyalties to family are strongest, but “unlike JD Vance in his spat with the Pope, Smith would have said, ‘It is possible to have loyalties and feel sympathy towards people in difficult situations in any part of the world.’”
He points out of the window towards the church where his father, the Rev John Brown, was minister. There are more churches in Kirkcaldy than you can shake a stick at. “There was a disruption,” Brown says, “so churches broke away from each other. My father was one of the dissenters.” Gordon and his two brothers, John and Andrew, grew up in the draughty old manse. There was no central heating until they were teenagers. “It was quite cold.” How cold? “You got used to it.”
His mother, Jessie, had a huge influence on him, too, he says. “She always asked whether I really wanted to do the things I was doing. She made you question what you were doing.” The porridge-every-morning Calvinist upbringing was “quite strict”. He pauses. “She was quite appalled one day. She said, ‘I’ve heard a terrible story about you. I’ve heard you sometimes swear.’” (The only exclamation I hear him use is a forceful “gee whizz”.)
When the Beatles came to Kirkcaldy, the Brown boys “didn’t get to go”. Because the Fab Four encouraged loose morals? “We were told we were too young. People in my class were going, but I wasn’t.” He laughs deeply. “Luckily, I have met Paul McCartney since.” He tells me the Beatles had links with the town because John Lennon had “an aunt or someone” who lived here.
Kirkcaldy was where Brown’s prodigious intelligence was first recognised. He excelled in everything. Academically, he was fast-tracked to the University of Edinburgh at the age of 16. He was the Kirkcaldy boys’ tennis champion, a sprinter, an excellent rugby flanker. It was while playing rugby that he sustained a detached retina, an injury so serious he spent three months lying in a hospital bed, eyes bandaged, unable to move. He lost the sight in his left eye, and nearly in his right eye, too. The disability stopped him doing the thing he really wanted to do – sport – and he was forced to rethink his ambitions. “I think that’s what made me want to do something more active in the community.”
after newsletter promotion
On the back seat of the car are the copious notes Brown makes while people talk to him, large letters in black felt tip, stuffed in a transparent folder. Biographers say he was an introverted child. Still now, there’s a voice in his head before he stands to give a speech, saying, “Am I really wanting to do this?” But another says, “Yes, you really have to.” “I don’t get up in the morning wanting to be on the radio or television or in front of a crowd. You do things out of obligation.”
When he was young, hierarchy expected deference, he says. The students of his generation protested, pushing “for greater individual freedom”. Photos of Brown show a serious student with long hair in a severe side-parting (unlike his beer-drinking contemporaries, he is wearing a tie). He admits he may have been more leftwing then than in his New Labour days. “But what happened in a way was that the balance between individual freedom and social obligation, between self-expression and your sense of being part of a community, got out of sync. So we threw out the baby with the bathwater. We threw out this idea that we’re a part of a society.
And I think that’s the reason why commercialisation, consumerism, the amassing of wealth, inequality has become so prevalent. Because we’ve lost that sense of social obligation to each other, this sense that we’re part of one community.”
While we’re on the subject of protest (and empathy), I ask about Labour’s treatment of peaceful Palestine Action protesters, thrown into police vans for holding placards in support of activists who raided an Israeli drone manufacturer based in the UK. “I think you’ll find most people in the Labour party did not intend this to be the outcome,” he says. “And I have always defended the freedom to assemble and protest peacefully.”
We pass a disused linoleum factory, and he points it out for me, as an important part of the industrial history of the town. “They lost out to fitted carpets,” he explains.
Being with Brown is like being with a particularly feverish member of the Scottish tourist board. Did I know there’s an exhibition of Scottish colourists in Perth (even he “hadn’t realised how many there were”)? Did I know the current one-mile world record holder is a Scot called Josh Kerr? Did I hear Scottish football fans were feted in Boston during the World Cup because they were so well behaved (though “obviously they drank the place dry”)? Do I know about famous Fife emigres, such as Andrew Carnegie? Don’t get him started on the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers. Did I know that three tenets of the US Declaration of Independence come from Scotland? Did I know Barack Obama has Scottish ancestry?
But he’s also self-deprecating, saying that when he fought the Scottish Nationalist party in the 2014 independence referendum, “I always had this line: ‘I’m Scottish through and through.’ But we did this DNA test and before 1700 we’re actually from Sweden!”
Bearing in mind his ardour for Scotland and the rise of English nationalism, does he now feel that swooping in on the side of no was a mistake? “That’s not in the book,” he says. Pressed, he recognises that the present status quo is not satisfactory and probably half the country want independence. At the same time, he says, “Scotland’s got to find a way of living in cooperation with other countries, and independence would not be the right way forward. We’re geographically, economically, socially, culturally linked to the rest of the United Kingdom, whether it’s Wales, England or parts of Ireland.”
Surely, that “part” of Ireland is geographically linked with the other part of Ireland, so, by this reasoning should Ireland be united? “Yes. Well, of course, in the long term, Ireland will be united.” Wait, what? Brown, who was heavily involved in the peace talks that followed the Good Friday agreement in 1998, has always been pro-union. He says that a united Ireland will be “a long process where people have got to come together and find a way of agreeing. Basically, that is the issue: whether people can actually agree.”
The climate debate is raging, we are frying in record temperatures, phones are squawking with government wildfire warnings. There’s fierce criticism of Burnham for his support of drilling in the North Sea. I know Brown supports this, too, justifying it on the grounds it creates jobs in Scotland – but surely, we need to do something now? “The debate, Charlotte, seems to be divided between those who support North Sea development and those who support renewables. But I don’t think that’s the conflict.”
Like Burnham, he argues that the same skills and infrastructure used for the development of the North Sea for oil and gas can also be used for the future development of renewables. “So the future of the North Sea is not that it dies when oil and gas run out but moves in a transitional way to hydrogen, wind and carbon capture. Thousands of jobs still can be based on the North Sea, but they will gradually move through to being jobs based on renewables.” Many might feel this is quintessential New Labour triangulation that fails to recognise the urgency of the moment. A touch of après moi, le deluge?
Brown has written a lot about what he got right and what he got wrong in government. (Does this self-reflection help him? “No.”) “One of my faults was I wasn’t as good at communicating as I should have been,” he says now. He knows it would be worse in the world of social media, that no politician would “survive” without cringey TikToks and Reels. Would he have coped? “I don’t know how good I would have been. It depends on your willingness to open yourself up to different things. But Andy would be the first to tell you that it’s not just your ability to communicate; you’ve got to have the right policies.”
Unwittingly, he became a TikTok star while in the queue to the Scotland game at the World Cup (he’d promised his younger son they’d go if Scotland qualified). There he was, smiling among the fans in tartan tam o’shanters, incongruous in a smart blue shirt.
Was he the only fan not in a Scotland jersey? “No, no!” he scoffs. “Not everybody can afford £100 for a jersey, as I told my son. A hundred pounds! Actually, they were charging £90, I think. I wasn’t in a kilt, either, but I was wearing a blue shirt and Scotland plays in blue.” Does he have a kilt? “No, no! The last time I wore a kilt, I was eight or 10.” His parents forced him into one for church on Sundays. “I didn’t like it.”
Football is Brown’s great love, his “best relaxation” in No 10 and still now it’s how he unwinds – on the edge of an armchair in his sitting room, shouting and pumping his fist at a screen the size of a wall, the green reflection perhaps visible to passing ships.
He saw Scotland in the World Cups of 1982 and 1990, too. In 1998, as the newly appointed chancellor after the New Labour landslide of 97, he watched them play Brazil in Paris, standing behind the Duke of Edinburgh, who was furious when the unofficial national anthem, Flower of Scotland, was played, spitting with incredulity, “‘What is that?’” Brown says. “He thought it was going to be God Save the Queen and was very annoyed. It was really funny.” (Later, I ask his adviser if Brown is a republican and she tells me firmly I am not to ask.)
“The book … ” he urges. Yes! The book. To write it he rose at 5am, ascending to this office and bashing at his keyboard for four hours straight. He has breakfast, scrambled egg and tomato, or smoked salmon and toast (you can tell when his wife, Sarah, is not at home because the kitchen looks like something out of The Young Ones), then “gets on” with the day job.
Brown married late, at 49 – his single status was once used against him as a candidate for high office – to Sarah’s 36. Their first child, a daughter called Jennifer, was born prematurely in 2001 and died in Brown’s arms at 10 days old. He has said he didn’t want to go back into politics after her death, that he wanted to “stay away”.
“For the first few months, I couldn’t really smile or anything. I couldn’t listen to music. It was a very difficult period. But you do decide that something good has got to come out of a tragedy, and that’s what we – Sarah in particular – tried to do.” They founded the Jennifer Brown Research Laboratory, to better understand premature births. Sarah also runs the charity Theirworld; among other places, they helped schoolgirls in Afghanistan and organised “pop-up” Sure Start centres in Gaza. Brown has said he cannot bear to think of children suffering, that the needless deaths of children all over the world makes him angry.
In the past, he worried that his two sons, John, 22, and Fraser, 20, found him “old”. That he’d done them a “disservice” with the age gap. Today he’s feeling spry. At the house, Sarah comes in to say hi with a small dog struggling with excitement in her arms. He’s said that she was a great sounding board on women’s issues and equality. (Does he have a theory of why there still hasn’t been a female leader of Labour? “Timing.”)
The boys don’t remember much of Downing Street. Brown has joked about how they’d occasionally burst into meetings (memorably, one with the US general David Petraeus and Northern Ireland first minister Ian Paisley, at whom one son shouted, “Teach me how to march!”). All were affected by the pernicious savaging by the Murdoch press, who he says printed “complete lies” and used “black arts” to snoop bank accounts and medical records. “I don’t think people understand just how much damage the Murdoch press did,” Brown says, “how much they tried to control British political life for years. They were operating hand in glove with the Conservative party attempting to control British politics – for commercial gain, as well as for political influence. They were only stopped by exposure.” Examples he gives include the Remembrance service where he bowed his head in prayer and the Sun claimed he’d fallen asleep.
“It’s difficult to understand how they can talk about a free press when they actually wanted a press that dictated events regardless of truth,” he says. In 2024, with new information, Brown made a submission to the Metropolitan police. Have they formally opened an investigation? “I’ll have to come back to you on that.”
Brown speaks in swathes of sentences with multiple clauses, and reads multiple books at a time. Currently, one on the Cambridge spies, which he thinks should be made into a film – “It really makes you very worried about the damage spies can do.” Another, Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope, is a “reinterpretation” of the civil rights movement. Another is a history of the 1960s by David Kynaston. Plus he just finished Lyse Doucet’s The Finest Hotel in Kabul. To each review, he brings an unfiltered enthusiasm. What will he take on his summer holidays? “Ha! If I could get a summer holiday.”
He listens to podcasts and participates in philosophical discussion. His jokes are highbrow and niche. There’s one about 1960s Labour party entryism, another about Austrian economists, and one about 1970s rock bands I didn’t understand. I notice he has a slightly seesawing walk as we return from the charity, but remarkable stamina given we haven’t had lunch (he demolished a Tunnock’s teacake, scrunching the foil into his pocket).
How does he keep going at this pace at 75? “You’ve got to try harder to stay fit.” How? “Lots of walking, a bit of treadmill, a bit of these machines.” Machines? He admits Sarah bought a Pilates reformer years ago which “maybe” he uses, too. How often? “Four days a week.” Are there any aspects of ageing that he’s found hard? Memory fade, creaky joints? “You don’t want to go grey,” he says, “and I’m sorry I have. I always had very dark hair. But that’s life.”
When he smiles, it’s like the sun bursting through cloud, so I ask about his famed temper. He says he doesn’t recognise the characterisation. “Look, we all get angry. We all respond to certain situations in a way that sometimes you would prefer not to. But I don’t see myself as someone who regularly loses their temper.”
Perhaps the formidable Brown, once known for his fierce glare, basso profondo and intolerance of the ridiculous, has mellowed? “Look, I’m still working as hard as I did 20 years ago. I don’t think I’ve let up.”
