Gordon Brown: I was too reserved to succeed as PM in the Twitter age
In a remarkably honest new book, ex-PM says he’s from an era when what politicians did mattered more than being ‘touchy feely’
Gordon Brown has admitted his ‘ sense of personal reserve’ limited his appeal as prime minister in the social media age as he gave a brutally frank account of his struggles in downing Street.
In his new memoirs, Mr Brown opens up with searing candour about how he fell short in communicating his ideas and connecting to the electorate during his three-year tenure in no 10 between 2007 and 2010.
He said he came from a less touchy-feely age when it was seen as more important to run the country well than make public displays of emotion.
While he insists he never wanted to be a ‘Twitter’ prime minister, he admits he wasn’t an ideal fit for the post-Tony Blair age and that he was uncomfortable talking about his emotions in public.
The admission comes in the former Labour prime minister and chancellor’s memoirs, My Life, our Times, which is being published next week.
Mr Brown, 66, also admits that he ‘failed to rally the nation’ around his plans to beat the financial crash by boosting public investment, describing this as his ‘ biggest regret’ of his premiership.
He said he now accepted that in a media- conscious age he should have ‘lightened up’. But he said he did not believe it was right for politicians to expect they could win votes by simply turning on the emotion and saying ‘I can feel your pain’.
He said: ‘What mattered, I thought, was how others might benefit from what I did for them as an active politician – not what I claimed to feel.
‘If in my political career I was backward in coming forward, my failure was not so much a resistance to letting the public in – I never shrank from that – it was resisting the pressure to cultivate an image that made the personal constantly public. reticence was the rule.’
At the time Mr Brown’s supporters said that, unlike his predecessor Mr Blair who had been a master of public relations and spin, his dourness was a strength because it made him appear more trustworthy.
But Mr Brown admits that this may have been a weakness. ‘during my time as an MP I never mastered the capacity to leave a good impression or sculpt my public image in 140 characters,’ he said – referring to the maximum length of a message on Twitter.
‘now no politician can succeed without mastering social media – and yet, in it, the prime
‘Public display of emotion’
minister becomes one among millions of voices competing to be heard.’ He said it took him too long to understand that ‘any idea, big or small, is of little significance until it can be communicated compellingly and in clear terms’.
Mr Brown goes on: ‘The modern version of “connecting” seems to increasingly include a public display of emotion, with the latter – authentic or not – seen as evidence of a sincerity required for political success.
‘In a far more touchy-feely era, our leaders speak of public issues in intensely personal ways and assume they can win votes simply by telling their electors that they “feel their pain”.
‘For me, being conspicuously demonstrative is uncomfortable – to the point that it has taken me years, despite the urging of friends, to turn to writing this book.’ He added: ‘I fully under- stand that in a media-conscious age every politician has to lighten up to get a message across and I accept that, in the second decade of the 21st century, a sense of personal reserve can limit the appeal and rapport of a leader.
‘I am not, I hope, remote, offhand or uncommunicative. But if I wasn’t an ideal fit for an age when the personal side of politics had come to the fore, I hope people will come to understand this was not an aloofness or detachment or, I hope, insensi- tivity or a lack of emotional intelligence on my part.
‘really, to my mind, what mattered was not what I said about myself, but simply what our government could do for our country.’
In Mr Brown’s memoirs, a highly-personal account of his life in politics, he talks about the death of his daughter Jennifer Jane ten days after she was born prematurely, and how he always fought to keep his children’s lives private.
He and his wife Sarah married
in 2000 and have two sons, John and Fraser. But he also speaks about the defining event of his premiership: the global financial crash and its aftermath, saying the recession and Brexit added up to a ‘lost decade’.
And he revealed that his ‘biggest regret’ was failing to persuade the public that Labour was the right party to deal with the impact of the financial crash.
The recession began just months after Mr Brown became prime minister in 2007, and he was forced to go to the electorate in 2010 when the economy was still being battered by its aftermath.
His Labour government argued for continued public investment to counter the impact of the recession – but David Cameron’s Tories pledged immediate austerity to bring the country’s debt under control. It was Mr Cameron who emerged victorious – although he was not able to get a majority and had to go into coalition with the Liberal Democrats.
In the introduction to his memoirs, Mr Brown wrote: ‘The time has come to look back and take stock of what I was trying to do and of what I got wrong as well as what I hope I got right.
‘My own biggest regret was that in the greatest peacetime challenge – a catastrophic global recession – I could not persuade the British people that the progressive policies I pushed for, nationally and internationally, were the right and fairest way to respond. Through unprecedented co-operation worldwide in a plan for recovery, growth quickly returned, unemployment started to fall and people’s savings were secured.
‘We won the battle – to escape recession. But we lost the war – to build something better. I fell short in communicating my ideas. I failed to rally the nation around the necessary fiscal stimulus and my plans for radical change.
‘Banking should have been transformed, our international institutions refashioned, inequality radically reversed – and if we are to be
‘My biggest regret’
properly equipped to face the next crisis this is still the agenda we must pursue.’
The former PM wrote that he was determined while in Downing Street to ensure his children grew up out of the public gaze. ‘After we left Downing Street some people wrote to me saying that they had not known I had any children until they saw the footage of our family leaving together – and the warmth they saw between us revealed something about me of which they had also been unaware,’ he said.