United Kingdom: Goodbye Gordon Brown

“Few politicians have fallen so far so fast,” said Roy Hattersley in the London Times. After just three years in office, Gordon Brown resigned as British prime minister this week, following his Labor Party’s loss to the Conservatives in last week’s elections. Poor Brown had waited 10 long years for his turn at the top. Back in the early 1990s, he was more instrumental than even Tony Blair in revamping Labor, making it more centrist and fiscally responsible. By rights, he should have become party leader, since he was “in every political way but one the superior member of the Brown-Blair partnership.” The exception was charm. Brown had “no time to spare for cultivating bogus charisma,” so it was Blair who became prime minister, while Brown spent a decade in the No. 2 spot as chancellor of the exchequer. During those years of waiting, “the iron entered his soul,” and he earned a reputation as a bully. His “consuming passion,” it appeared, was to become prime minister.

Pity he made such an inept one, said Kevin Schofield and Graeme Wilson in the London Sun. Once he got into power in 2008, Brown was a veritable gaffe machine. He was “forced into a humiliating apology” after his communications chief was caught sending “vicious e-mails smearing” top Conservatives. But arguably the worst blunder came just two weeks ago, near the end of the campaign. Cornered by an irate grandmother who raised concerns about immigration, Brown condescendingly patted her on the back, and shortly afterward, forgetting he was still miked, he called the widowed pensioner “a bigot.” That gaffe prompted his most abject apology yet, though by then, no amount of remorse could save him.

Yet for all his flaws, Brown always put loyalty to party and country above his own interests, said Donald Macintyre in the London Independent. “Back in 1994, Brown did in fact make a supreme personal sacrifice by deciding not to run against Blair” as party leader. He probably could have defeated Blair then, had he appealed to Labor’s left wing. But he stayed true to his principles of fiscal responsibility. It is due to his efforts as chancellor that Britain has an independent Bank of England and that it never adopted the euro, two factors that now shelter the country from the economic crisis in Europe. Now he is “leaving with dignity, having fought a gallant, dogged campaign to save Labor from eclipse.”

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There was no dignity in Brown’s exit—he was forced out, said Richard Littlejohn in the London Daily Mail. For five days after losing the election, Brown tried desperately to “cling to office,” negotiating with the third-place Liberal Democrats to try to form a “coalition of losers” that could keep the Conservatives out of power. “It could not have been more blatant had he ordered the tanks to roll down Whitehall Street” to Parliament. Had he possessed “a shred of decency,” he would have resigned as soon as the votes were counted. Instead, he left only after his “naked power grab” failed. Brown’s legacy, then, is an “attempted coup” that marked “a new low in British political life.”