Fifteen years after he left 10 Downing Street, Gordon Brown still has people who turn up at his gates: fanatical followers, disciples of his economics who, like all fans, feel they understand him so well they can improve on his work. One man came from Australia, called to Brown by a dream, to tinker with one of his fiscal ideas.
North Queensferry is hot and still at 9am on a Thursday morning in April and the Firth of Forth is shining so bright you can’t look at it head on. Brown, suited as you’d imagine, has been up for four hours. When he left No 10 it made sense to have a home office built – because the working day starts so early, it wasn’t fair on his police protection officers. He has had a good breakfast, but I don’t see him eat again before he heads into a board meeting at 2pm. He has “barely had a cup of tea in my life”, he says, and only one coffee in 15 years. It was made for him by Alex Ferguson, who went all the way downstairs and up again while still in recovery for his brain haemorrhage, so Brown couldn’t refuse.
We climb to the office at the top of his house. At 6am, the Guardian had published one of Brown’s op-eds in which he suggested we mobilise the $1trn financial power of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help the most vulnerable countries hit by Trump’s extraordinary tariffs. Within hours, political journalists were tweeting things like “He should be appointed Britain’s sherpa to organise an emergency G20 meeting” (Will Hutton). Many people think Brown ought to be back in some position of power, but you won’t get any comment from the man who points out, in his autobiography, that on his first trip to London, aged 12, he didn’t visit the Houses of Parliament and clearly had no intention of becoming a politician.
In 2011 – after serving as prime minister from 2007 to 2010, and chancellor for a decade before that – Brown was considered for the role of managing director of the IMF, succeeding Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but the incoming PM David Cameron put paid to that idea. I bet he wishes he had the job now? “Ha! The government would never have allowed it. It would have been an admission that what we’d done in the global financial crisis was the right thing.”
Sitting by a big sunny window, he sketches out a new, “fifth” economic world order. “The unipolar, hegemonic American order is gone and cannot be brought back. We are in a multipolar world now – there are global problems that cannot be solved without working together. The tariffs show you can weaponise your interdependency, and that makes us more vulnerable. So unless you build a global order with a more cooperative way of solving problems like climate change or pandemics, everybody’s going to suffer. This is the last gasp of America trying to dictate to the world on its own terms, without trying consultation and negotiation. They will never be able to do that again.”
Unlike with Tony Blair, there is no official institute, no office of young apparatchiks. Brown’s op-eds are written quickly but go into their “19th or 20th draft”. How does No 10 respond to them? “I mean, I talk to them,” he says, with an instant irritation reserved for questions about the government. “I did send the column in advance, but whether they’ve got time to read it or not, I don’t know! They’re very busy!”
He is seen in the corridors of Westminster, and works closely with the minister for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), Alison McGovern (“You should interview her and not me!”). He proposes policies to the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves – a gambling tax, for instance – and gets them through “by pressing, and getting legal advice”. He has designed a host of economic reforms to charity, such as a change to the VAT system that currently charges 20 per cent on anything companies might give away for free – meaning it costs them less to destroy goods than donate. “I think we’re going to get that through in the next week…”
Brown defaults to two phrases when asked about his interventions. “I don’t want to be a backseat driver,” and sometimes, curiously, the thing he used to say in response to questions about Tony Blair: “I don’t want to talk about the past!”
“I don’t like doing television. I actually don’t like doing interviews,” he says. “I don’t want to be critical of the government, but where there’s an international issue, or something that I think you can make a difference on, I’ll try…”
As Keir Starmer’s government hovers on the edge of a second era of austerity, Brown has been engaging, in a grassroots way, with the alarming truth of a child poverty epidemic in the UK. He is guest-editing next week’s issue of the New Statesman on the subject. In three years he has founded six Multibanks: vast hubs distributing the surplus goods of Amazon and other companies within the community, providing the things that get knocked off the shopping list when people only have enough money for food.
There is something faintly dystopian about Amazon giving goods to the new poor, many of whom are for the first time – as Brown’s reports point out – not unemployed, but living below the breadline in poorly paid jobs and zero-hours contracts. He has proposed a social impact fund to Reeves: £1bn of corporate donations. “Some companies are good and some are terrible, so there’s a bit of exposure, a bit of name and shame…”
Fife was once its own kingdom, and for Brown it is a place where he can feel the presence of civic life. “Maybe it’s the right size – about 350,000 people – but you manage to have a sort of collective loyalty.” In his early Labour years as MP for Dunfermline East (he was elected in 1983), Brown fought for the jobs of 340 miners arrested for picketing and sacked by the National Coal Board: “The chief of police in Fife, and all the churches, they all came together.”
The picket took place at the coal yard in Lochgelly that is now the site of the first Multibank, the Big House, and we head there in the Range Rover. Brown sits behind the passenger seat with his guest on his right, in line for his good eye.
His involvement with the project has been typically forensic: he did a contract for one million toilet rolls, a million bars of soap. He could make a decent Panorama on the absurdity he has uncovered while getting his business partnerships going, like the fact that hotel bedsheets are thrown out by the industrial laundries that own them after just 80 washes; or that one classy establishment sends its quality Egyptian cotton sheets to Sweden where they are ripped up and made into rags for mechanics. The Multibank scheme is, you suspect, an opportunity to show up an epidemic of corporate waste and environmental damage, as well as child poverty. It must be satisfying, shaming companies into charity work? He gives a big smile and looks out of the window.
At the Big House, crates descend on fork-lift trucks containing everything from toy unicorns to period pants. It does not work like a food bank, with people turning up. To avoid stigma – and, as someone tells me, “to prevent knock-off” – goods are distributed through local charities to the people who need them. Human stories fill the air: the homeless man whose acquisition of a pair of curtains for his temporary room began a trajectory of re-domestication; the girl given new clothes after being spotted in school uniform on a Saturday.
A few weeks earlier, I watched Brown at the opening of the latest hub in Birmingham, a city where one in two children now lives in poverty. He moved around the 8,000ft warehouse as smoothly as Bill Clinton: a minute for everyone, with a tailored anecdote, a memory and heavy shake of the hand. Young staff from local charities were given as much time as mayors. There were funny stories, like the time Brown walked from east to west Germany with Jon Bon Jovi to commemorate 20 years of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
He can’t be seen in the pictures of the Cool Britannia parties, alongside Liam and Noel Gallagher. “Ah yeah, I wasn’t at those, they were Tony’s thing.” If a sense of dourness has dogged his image – he was always instructed to smile more – it is not evident in social situations. Then the local TV cameras turn up and the face falls into seriousness, the spoken lines become repeated and urgent: “If we do nothing, there will be 500,000 more children in poverty in four years’ time.” There are hidden, abrupt changes of mood – solo departures from the entourage (“Where’s he gone?!”) and a retreat upstairs to sit on a table swinging his legs.
He hates having his photo taken – though whether it is the glare of the flash or his self-consciousness, it’s not quite clear. The actors they get to play Brown in biopics are always lookers. The latest is Dougray Scott, who came to meet him recently, observing his mannerisms. The curious, 20-year cycle of cultural interest has produced two new dramas centred upon the era when Brown was prime minister. Scott plays him in a forthcoming seven-part ITV show about the phone-hacking scandal, The Hack, recreating the speech Brown made in the House of Commons accusing Rupert Murdoch of running a criminal media nexus: Murdoch’s surveillance dogged him. And a new James Graham play about Fred “The Shred” Goodwin, and the role of RBS in the financial crash of 2008, opens in the summer. It features Brian Cox as the ghost of Brown’s 18th-century economist hero Adam Smith – himself born in Kirkcaldy, like Brown.
Back in the Range Rover, I ask him when he was professionally happiest, and he laughs out loud: “I never think about happiness… When did I feel like I did my best is a different thing.”
It was, it transpires, not his time as John Smith’s protégé in the Eighties, nor the years plotting New Labour with Blair, but the very thing that overwhelmed his time at the top: the world financial crisis.
“I feel I did understand it, and I did help us get through it, and I did build an international coalition to try to solve what was a global problem. Being there with some previous financial experience, knowing a lot of the leaders around the world, I was able to do something.”
He regrets not telling the public how close we came to financial lockdown in 2008.
“In the Thirties, when there was a global recession, Roosevelt could go on the radio at eight o’clock on a Saturday night in America, and people would listen to him. Now you’d be competing with Strictly Come Dancing.”
He wishes he was prime minister in the time of Twitter. “I was just at the cusp, so I’m the first prime minister that used emails; I mean, Tony didn’t use emails!” What would he have explained on Twitter, if he could?
“What people didn’t understand was what had caused the financial crisis – it was easy for the Conservatives to blame the government. They didn’t understand: a) it started in America, and b) it was caused by profligacy and greed in the financial sector. No banker ever went to prison, because our laws were not strong enough to deal with that – bankers should have gone to prison. I never got that message across – that we were acting to save people from a banking system that had failed them. What I regret most of all is that we had a way out of the crisis… America managed to grow its way out of recession without austerity, and Britain made out that it was the only answer. And it wasn’t, and a lot of people suffered. It shouldn’t have happened. That’s life.”
The finer points of economics would be intrinsically hard to communicate even if the prime minster had a ten-minute slot on The Graham Norton Show. On the subject of child tax credits – “exactly what I came into politics to do” – Brown also seems frustrated about messaging.
“Joe Biden introduced a child tax credit after the Covid crisis, and literally millions of children were taken out of poverty. Then Congress decided to vote it out, and people asked why, when it was taken away, did nobody complain? One study suggests that people in America thought that when they got the tax credit, there was some catch, or it was a mistake. They didn’t believe that the state could help them.
“If you tell people you’re getting a tax cut, they’ll remember, but if you tell people about child tax credits, they don’t quite understand what we’re doing. Wrapped around ours were services like Sure Start, the Education Maintenance Allowances. But that was all broken and taken. Everything that we did, almost as a vindictive act, the Tories tried to smash up.”
Brown coined the phrase “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, which is generally attributed to Blair. His new slogan is “Coalition of Compassion”: “Compassion is like the flame of a candle. It burns very brightly when you’re close up to people, and you’re prepared to be generous to those close to you. We’ve got to persuade people that generosity should extend further. I worked out that the average income of the top 1 per cent is £270,000 a year – and the average donation to charity is only £600!”
As an abstract, he says, child poverty does not register. “Why is that? Can you explain it?” he asks. In 2001, he lost his daughter Jennifer at 11 days old to a brain haemorrhage: the Jennifer Brown Research Laboratory in Edinburgh, founded by him and his wife, Sarah, does pioneering work for premature babies. He has said that his interest in the campaign was magnified by what happened: “It eats into you.” Brown recently returned to his former primary school in Kirkcaldy, distributing 60 winter coats to children who didn’t have one.
“You’re seeing the kind of separation between the very poor and the rest that I don’t think I saw at any other point in my life,” he says. “At my school they’ve had to bring in a social worker to try and bring people together.”
The danger is that the government relies on charity to take care of the poor. Does he think it’s a political choice to balance the books with benefit cuts?
“Well, I’m still hopeful that the government will announce…” but he never quite says what. “It’s perfectly defensible to say that the incapacity benefit system has got to change, because some of it’s not really working, but the worrying issue is if people are in poverty as a result. I’m still hopeful that the government will take the action, in the Budget probably in November, to prevent a rise in poverty, so that, to me, is still a question that is not yet resolved…”
In the Sixties, Fife rules stipulated that only two fiction books could be withdrawn from the local library at any one time: “Fiction was not serious enough!” says Brown, as the Range Rover pulls into Kirkcaldy town centre. Much has been written of his strange, accelerated educational life: born in 1951, he was involved in an experiment by the Scottish authorities to fast-track children through school in the hope they’d be better prepared for their degrees. In an essay in May 1967, the 16-year-old Brown wrote: “I was a guinea pig. The victim of a totally unsighted and ludicrous experiment in education, the result of which was to harm materially and mentally the guinea pigs.” Did he regret going to university at 16? “No, I benefited from it. It was many of my contemporaries that didn’t.”
His mother was a shy woman who had been involved with the code-breaking operation in London during the war. Good with numbers, she ran her father’s timber company, and told him: “‘I can’t believe you’re chancellor, you’re no good with money.’ She taught me never to overestimate myself. I think she was quite surprised where I ended up.”
We pass the church his father, John, presided over as a minister of the Church of Scotland – which looms, like a mini cathedral, over another church right next to it. There were 12 in total in town, but judging by St Bryce, with its 200ft tower, his dad was a big cheese: “He stood before me like a mountain. But not in a bad way!”
When he was a child, Brown and his brother John started a weekly gazette for which he wrote his first political pieces. Even at 11, he was thinking internationally: “We should, and must, have a strong and reliable government to promote our interests in Europe and the World,” he wrote in one issue. All the proceeds of the paper went to African refugees. Didn’t they want to earn some pocket money? “Oh, that wouldn’t have happened!” he laughs.
His father was the kind of man who would go to a football game and applaud both sides. “I asked him why. He said, ‘But you’ve got to applaud when someone does something well!’”
John Brown gave a sermon titled “Our Need of Vision” while his son Gordon lay in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary recovering from retinal detachment following a particularly brutal rugby scrum. Brown had to lie completely flat, eyes covered, without a pillow, and missed most of his first year at university. What did he do with his brain? A blind historian at Edinburgh named Fred Reid who listened to history books on tape would share them with him, he explains, so he could keep up his studies. “I was fortunate to have had access to the talking books service, given you usually had to be declared officially blind.”
Each night, on the ward, a charity would push a tray of alcohol round – Guinness and wine – and Brown would indulge, though his father was teetotal. The sight in his second eye was saved by a pioneering eye doctor, Hector Chawla, who is 86 now and remains a friend. In 2009, when Ireland voted for the Treaty of Lisbon and Nick Griffin drifted into view, the retina started to detach again, but Chawla advised him not to have it operated on. He gave up football and rugby long ago. Does he still run?
“I certainly walk!”
There is a sense of precariousness about his sight, living with two retinal tears on his good eye. But, he says: “What we forget is every family has some difficulties somewhere. If people are falling into poverty, there’s often a crisis, a redundancy or cancer in the family, or some bereavement, and the welfare system is not geared to helping people through crises. We can never understand all the circumstances within an individual family that push them over the edge, but I just feel that what you learn is that whatever circumstances you’ve faced, other people are usually facing far worse.”
During the financial crisis, Brown delivered a sermon from St Paul’s Cathedral after consulting the then archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and the chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. The meltdown, he said, “showed how the world had worshipped at the altar of wealth and greed, and forgotten that a successful economy needed to be built on trust and fairness”.
He later said he regretted not drawing a clearer line between his faith and his political choices: “This was, to my regret, a problem that I never really resolved. I suspect I was thought of as more like a technician lacking solid convictions. And, despite my strong personal religious beliefs, I never really countered that impression.” Yet he is still not ready to talk about bringing religion and morality into politics.
“It’s a dangerous issue,” he says. “I think all of them [he means Church leaders] have hit very difficult times, because they’ve got all these issues about personal morality, and they’ve also got all these issues about the abuse of power, and they haven’t dealt with them well.
“From the 1960s onwards, the emphasis was all on personal liberation,” he continues. “It was freedom and autonomy. The emphasis on the ‘I’ at the expense of the ‘us’ has become a problem, because lots of the civic associations have broken down. If you lose this sense that it’s important to belong to something bigger than yourself, then I think you lose quite a lot. Where do you go if you have a problem now?”
In her autobiography, Theresa May, the daughter of a manse, recalled a sense of being watched by the whole community growing up. Was there a feeling that the Brown boys couldn’t be naughty?
“There was a bit of that. My father was also involved with the school, and there was an awful moment when I was 16. It was the school prize-giving, and my father was giving the speech, and my mother was presenting the prizes, and I was getting the Dux [top dog] prize. We had a row I’ll never forget, because they were determined I’d get my hair cut, and I refused! It was supposed to be a nice occasion, and we were fighting each other.”
Did he get a haircut? “Err, I did.”
Gordon Brown’s sense of being observed runs through his work. He is so careful in the way he speaks, yet some of the things he asks me to leave out of this piece would only make him look good. All the while, he comes close to expressing his feelings, then retreating again, focusing instead on the sights out of the Range Rover window.
He points out that Kirkcaldy missed a trick, building all the buildings on the seafront backwards, to shelter them from the waves, rather than facing on to the ocean. “The waves used to batter the place, and the sea walls were not strong enough. When I was a child, this was all sandbags…”
[See also: Why George Osborne still runs Britain]
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This article appears in the 14 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Why George Osborne still runs Britain