A new biography reveals Brown to be a man of exceptional vision and probity – what a contrast with today’s politics

For a while, during the 13 years when Gordon Brown was at the apex of British politics, it became fashionable, and then a cliche, to depict him as a Shakespearean protagonist. He was the Scot who would be king, consumed by vaulting ambition for the throne, or else the powerful man of action, devoured by envy of his onetime friend. But in an illuminating new biography by the political journalist James Macintyre, Brown emerges as something closer to the hero of a Victorian novel: a man who leads an epic life shaped by early misfortune and later tragedy, driven onward by a moral purpose that burns to the very end.

His is a compelling story. Bill Clinton was once described as the most psychologically complex occupant of the Oval Office since Richard Nixon; the same is surely true if you substitute Brown, Downing Street and Winston Churchill. Macintyre hails him as a “titan”, brimming with both intellectual firepower and the urge, rooted in Christian faith, to do good. (When the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was asked to identify who in the current era most closely incarnates the values of the pastor and legendary anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he answered: “Gordon Brown.”) But Macintyre also describes his subject as “famously flawed”, with a volcanic temper, a talent for grudges – he stops speaking to Robin Cook and can barely remember why – a tendency towards “needless suspicion towards his perceived opponents” and a willingness to rely on a phalanx of “sometimes thuggish spin doctors”, expert in the blackest arts.

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