Gordon Brown: Power with Purpose – ‘illuminating’ biography of ‘towering’ politician

During his 13 years “at the apex of British politics”, Gordon Brown was often perceived as a “Shakespearean protagonist”, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. “He was the Scot who would be king, consumed by vaulting ambition.” Yet the Brown depicted in this “illuminating” biography is “closer to the hero of a Victorian novel”: a man “driven onwards by a moral purpose”, but beset by misfortune and tragedy.

While James Macintyre doesn’t skirt over his subject’s flaws (chiefly his “volcanic temper” and “talent for grudges”), he suggests that these are “vastly outweighed” by his “immense” achievements – which include overseeing massive reductions in child poverty as chancellor, and preventing the collapse of the entire financial system as PM through his decisive leadership after the 2008 crash.

Brown emerges as someone who defies “easy categorisation”: fiercely ambitious, he was uninterested in the “trappings of office”; famously lacking in emotional intelligence, he could be unexpectedly kind. What isn’t – or shouldn’t – be in doubt is his status as “one of the towering figures of recent British history”.

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Inevitably, Macintyre devotes considerable space to the “simmering tensions” with Tony Blair, said Nicola Sturgeon in The Observer. At times, the book seems as much “an account of the New Labour project” and the “rupture” with Blair as a portrait of Brown himself. Macintyre suggests that a basic misunderstanding lay at the heart of the infamous 1994 Granita “deal” between the two, said Ethan Croft in The New Statesman. When Blair said that he would “do ten years”, Brown thought he meant ten years as Labour leader – which would have meant stepping aside in 2004. Blair “thought it meant ten years as PM” – which is what he ended up serving. Whatever the case, after Blair resigned, the crown “proved heavy” for Brown. Gripped by a new indecisiveness – most evident in his dithering over whether to call a snap election in 2007 – the “Iron Chancellor” turned into “Brown the Bottler”.

But rather like former US president Jimmy Carter, Brown has “found the respect that eluded him in his prime in his ever-active retirement”, said Patrick Maguire in The Times. Instead of seeking “unfathomable riches on the consultancy circuit”, he has devoted himself to “tireless charity work, sermons from the moral high ground and exhortations to ministers on the plight of the poor”. While Macintyre’s cataloguing of these efforts doesn’t make for especially riveting reading, a “sympathetic treatment” of Brown is “probably overdue” – and that is certainly what he has given us.