A soothsayer speaks gravely, to urge a piece of insanity

Is it just nostalgia? Or is there something to it? Watching Gordon Brown yesterday, as he gave a speech in London about Brexit, I began to wonder. During his miserable spell as prime minister, Mr Brown became a political Aunt Sally. He was trashed, ridiculed and, even worse, pitied. To bellows of laughter in the Commons, Sir Vince Cable likened him to Mr Bean. You remember Sir Vince: the man who recently missed a knife-edge Commons vote on Brexit because he was busy holding talks about setting up an anti-brexit party, despite already leading an anti-brexit party himself. Yes, him. Even he felt able to join in the fun. That’s how bad it got.

But, no matter how ill-suited Mr Brown was to the top job, I’ll say this for him: next to most of today’s MPS, he looks like a giant. His speech yesterday was serious, sober, erudite and dignified. Voice booming and cavernous, he spoke without autocue, without notes, and without pause, the words flowing as if from some ancient seer. What a change it made from listening to the lightweights in Parliament, squeaking away like a bunch of cheap rubber chew toys.

Squeaking their platitudes, squeaking their righteousness, squeaking their complacent mirth. In

‘What a change it made from the lightweights in Parliament squeaking away like rubber chew toys’

the intellectual wasteland of today’s Commons, Mr Brown would sound like Solomon. Provided we could hear him above all the squeaking. His speech was largely about the Government’s handling of Brexit. It had, he said, been indecisive, rudderless, and disastrously shorttermist. (Easy though it would be fair to say the same description applies to Mr Brown’s premiership, it would be hard to argue he was wrong.)

The Government’s struggles, he went on, reminded him of that famous line of Einstein’s: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.”

So what was his solution?

“In the end the situation will have been seen to have changed since 2016,” said Mr Brown, “and the people should have a final say…”

Ah. A second referendum. Yes, for all his intellectual seriousness, Mr Brown is convinced that a second referendum would be a wise move. He seems to imagine that Leave voters, dismayed by the past two years of floundering and failure, could be persuaded to give up on Brexit. It appears not to have occurred to him that a second referendum campaign would barely be about Brexit: it would end up being about democracy, with Leave campaigners whipping up fury by painting the whole thing as an arrogant elitist plot to defy the people’s will. Yet Mr Brown wants another go, confident that this time around, common sense – or at least, his idea of common sense – would prevail.

Now, what was that line of Einstein’s again?