I Once Met …
I once met George – the ebullient, tired and emotional – Brown; not Gordon, the morose, introverted and taciturn one. A more colourful Foreign Secretary than Boris Johnson, a better economist than Harold Wilson, George was the best of Labour’s long list of leaders who never were.
A working-class genius with a chip on his shoulder, he was the Right’s candidate for the Labour leadership when Hugh Gaitskell died in 1963. Labour then didn’t allow votes to every passing lunatic with three quid to spare; so I sent telegrams to every Labour MP I knew, all ten of them, urging a vote for George rather than Harold Wilson.
George lost, to join Labour’s second string and become the most exciting shadow minister in Labour’s ranks; more inspiring than Harold, more thoughtful than any rival and more in touch with the people. When Labour came to power in 1964, he was given the impossible job of creating a national plan for growth. This stood no chance of working without a devaluation but Harold ruled that out.
Carrying the can for failure, George was moved to the Foreign Office but was still so popular that, when I interviewed him he got a loud cheer from the workers on the scaffolding as we walked to the Yorkshire Television studio.
It didn’t last. He and Harold were even more temperamentally incompatible than Gordon and Tony; ‘the hot potato and the cold fish’, the Sunday Times said. Problems emerged from his inability to hold his drink and his opposition to deflation. He resigned, lost his seat in Belper and was relegated to the Lords, as Lord George-brown.
In the crisis-ridden seventies, as government turned sober, serious and defensive, George moved the other way, still inspiring but now regularly ‘tired and emotional’. The last time I interviewed him, the cheers had turned to embarrassment as he staggered out of the studio clinging to the wall; though, when I became an MP in 1977, he would drop into the Members’ Dining Room to dispense wisdom and common sense to anyone who’d listen.
His disagreements with the party centred on his enthusiasm for Europe and his criticisms of the trade unions. He left Labour, only to fall into the gutter as he announced it. One of our most brilliant brains was dismissed as a slurring drunk, prematurely launching a one-man SDP, which he later joined. At the end, he walked out on his long-suffering wife to shack up with his secretary. A sad end to 45 years of marriage and to a man too big for our petty politics. People grow to leadership. Harold Wilson did and George would have, but never got the chance.
Harold got the glory. George suffered the consequences. Today his memory is distorted into apocryphal jokes – such as the one about his South American visit, asking a dazzlingly dressed figure to waltz, only to be told, ‘No. This isn’t a waltz. It’s the Peruvian national anthem. And I’m not a woman – I’m the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima.’ Too funny to be true. Just like George.