Gordon Brown’s return: a ‘revenge narrative’?

A dozen years after leaving Downing Street, former prime minister Gordon Brown has reclaimed the limelight by leading calls for urgent government action on the cost-of-living crisis.

Writing in The Observer, Brown said that Boris Johnson and the two Tory leadership hopefuls must agree to emergency measures this week, or “parliament should be recalled to force them to do so”.

The former Labour leader has also made headline-grabbing suggestions on the energy crisis in articles for papers including The Guardian and The Mirror and on Sky News.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The interventions add up to the most high-profile contribution in several years from the man who was PM between 2007 and 2010.

What has he been doing since No. 10?

After Labour lost the 2010 general election, Brown stood down as leader and returned to the backbenches, from where he played a leading role in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, advocating for Scotland to stay in the United Kingdom.

On the eve of the poll, he gave a speech that John Crace of The Guardian described as the “performance of his life”.

“What kind of message does Scotland send to the world if, tomorrow, we said we are going to give up on sharing, we are going to smash our partnership, we are going to abandon co-operation and we are going to throw the idea of solidarity into the dust,” Brown declared. The following day, Scotland voted to remain in the UK.

He was heavily linked with the role of managing director of the International Monetary Fund following the retirement of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 2011, but that position went to Christine Lagarde. Brown did take an unpaid advisory role at the World Economic Forum, was appointed as the inaugural distinguished global leader in residence by New York University and was named as a United Nations special envoy on global education.

He has also written a book, Beyond the Crash, which discusses the 2008 financial crisis and his vision for future co-ordinated global action.

‘Revenge narrative’

Now, amid the spiralling cost-of-living crisis, the “world savior” is striding on to this “hapless scene”, said Esther Webber for Politico’s London Playbook. Brown “attempting to seize the moment” has “a kind of revenge narrative”, she said, “given the defeat inflicted on him and subsequent blame for economic mismanagement meted out by David Cameron and George Osborne”.

Although his intervention is “aimed squarely at the PM and his would-be successors”, it’s “not exactly helpful to Keir Starmer”, Webber added. His latest opinion piece “begins by saying that crises ‘don’t take holidays’ … while the Labour leader is on holiday”.

Sky News’s chief political correspondent, Jon Craig, agreed that “some Labour activists must be wondering why it’s the ex-PM, who left the Commons in 2015, who’s leading the charge”.

But The Telegraph said it “ill behoves the former prime minister to hector the current Government about crisis management”, as “one reason why the country faces such a perilous winter” is “the failure of the Labour government of which he was a prominent member for 13 years”.

Between 1997 and 2010, construction did not begin on any new nuclear power reactors, the paper said, and “the lasting legacy of the Brown era was the Climate Change Act which committed the country to targets for reducing carbon emissions”.