My Life, Our Times by Gordon Brown; Westminster Diary Volume 2 by Bernard Donoughue

MICHAEL WHITE My Life, Our Times By Gordon Brown Bodley Head £25 Oldie price £16.99 inc p&p Westminster Diary, Volume 2 By Bernard Donoughue I B Tauris £25 Oldie price £18.32 inc p&p

A fellow Scot once remarked that ‘however much Gordon Brown achieves, it won’t be enough for his father’. Many relentlessly high achievers, including Winston Churchill and Rupert Murdoch, have been haunted by the same nagging fear.

Alas, the former prime minister’s long-delayed autobiography contains plenty of oblique hints that confirm the burden of expectation which the Reverend John Ebenezer Brown’s high-minded Calvinism bequeathed to his precocious middle son. ‘My father still towers over me like a mountain,’ Brown recalls, along with paternal maxims such as ‘Be grateful for what you have’ and ‘It’s remarkable what you can do without.’

Poor Gordon. His life has been marred by three unusually cruel, private tragedies, including the terrifying near-loss of his sight from a rugby injury shortly after the sports-mad 16-year-old arrived at Edinburgh University (the danger recurred in 2009) and the death of his newborn daughter, Jennifer Jane. They are described here at length. Brown’s evident emotional reticence only renders the accounts more distressing. On top of which, Fraser Brown was born with cystic fibrosis, a fact revealed by the Sun.

A fourth misfortune Brown could have done without was Tony Blair, a burden he handles less gracefully. The fair-minded reader opens this volume full of good intentions, aware of Brown’s intelligence, energy and determination to improve lives, especially of the vulnerable and elderly, but also of debt-burdened, poor nations. It is earnest, but admirable.

Despite his debilitating feud (‘vastly exaggerated’) with his over-mighty protégé, and despite the 2007-09 bankers’ crash and his predictable rejection by voters in 2010, the BlairBrown partnership did much to synthesise market Thatcherism with a more inclusive vision of Britain. When market failure came, Brown’s technocratic brain grasped the scale of the threat more quickly than the CEOS of the clearing banks or Threadneedle Street’s Mervyn King, who emerges in this memoir as a two-faced villain. After Brown boldly forced bank recapitalisation on the culprits, Washington and the EU followed Britain’s lead. It was Brown’s finest hour, but one for which he has unfairly received more blame (‘Labour’s recession’) than credit. Voters with short memories were quicker to downgrade his AAA credit rating than to remember that he had also protected them against Blair’s calamitous determination to join the euro.

That much of that downgrade is his own fault is persistently evident throughout this memoir, which is weightier but less appealing than Blair’s altogether breezier effort. Though he notes admiringly that Mandela has ‘no bitterness’, Brown cannot match him when complaining about Tory austerity, Mervyn King or the way the press prevented him getting his complex

message across in an era of touchy-feely ‘authenticity’.

He is apt to complain that Tony took all the credit or did something ‘against my advice’ or ‘without telling me’, while glossing over many occasions when the roles were reversed. It leaves a sour smell, like stale milk in the fridge or a big sister’s lament: ‘Mum, against my advice, Tony ate all his sandwiches on the way to school and was sick on teacher. But he still got the gold star I worked so hard for.’

This becomes tiresome. Hard-done-by Gordon tells us ‘I was right’ on taxes (Tony stopped him putting them up), on NHS reform (Tony wanted too much private-sector involvement), the euro (he was right) and austerity (he still asserts debt isn’t a problem). On Iraq and much else, ‘Nobody told me’ is the proffered excuse. Neither version shows credible candour or self-awareness. Of the regrettable decisions to promote diesel fuel, triangulate bank regulation or admit too many Polish plumbers after 2004, we hear very little.

Brown’s rascally press aides, Charlie Whelan and Damian Mcbride, who did so much to inflame what Blair called ‘tin-helmet time with Gordon’, are portrayed here as peripheral figures; virtually nuns. They were not – as Mcbride’s shockingly frank ‘Get Blair’ memoir, Power Trip, confirms. Insecure and paranoid, Honest Gordon averted his gaze from his minions’ activities. Yet in helping to trash Blair, he paved the way for Corbynism.

What better antidote to such selfdestructive ambition than to pick up the latest entertaining volume of Bernard Donoughue’s Westminster Diary, for the foot soldier’s perspective? The Labour academic, journalist, City man and co-owner of three-legged race horses, became a Downing Street adviser under Wilson and Callaghan in the turbulent 1970s, and served as a humble junior agriculture minister under Blair/brown until resigning (no, not sacked) at the age of 64 in 1999.

Not rating a mention in either of the great men’s indices, this former adviser to Yes, Minister was vastly more experienced than they were in the devious and obstructive ways of Whitehall. Donoughue offers his seniors sound advice on where to raise taxes (on betting and assorted farm subsidies) and other shrewd wheezes, knowing that he will probably be ignored. He cares, but is past illusion. They’re just kids and he wishes them well.

Raised on a rural Northamptonshire council estate, far poorer than self- pitying Brown, the now well-connected Donoughue loves politics, gossip (at Gstaad as well as the Lords), sport and lunch. As a ‘Blue Labour’ champion of working-class interests, he loathes the ‘politically correct claptrap’ too often found in the Guardian and votes accordingly, even when (in the case of gay sex at 16) he knows he’s wrong. Overall, it makes him more sympathetic to Brown, whose cultivation of Labour MPS and activists he is one of the first to note. That throws into contrast Blair’s conviction that the approbation of the media and metropolitan glitterati will be sufficient to sustain him.

Witty, worldly and wise, Donoughue regrets watching Blair presidentially overruling his ministers’ policies after being lobbied at No 10 by powerful interests. It’s bad for the ministers, the country, and ultimately for Blair and hopes of a fairer society. Donoughue’s dry critique of Blair penetrates further than Brown’s, who was not himself immune to overpromising and underdelivering, while he cared little about foot and mouth or other rural concerns. But Donoughue also advises Alastair Campbell how to protect the boss against Gordon.

Years later when Brown’s protégé, Ed Miliband, also sought Donoughue’s advice but found it unpalatable, he showed him the door. Our diarist went straight to Ladbrokes and put £100 on David Cameron to win the next election at odds of 5/2. That’ll teach them – if they want to learn.