By David Ferguson
Look on my works ye mighty, and despair…
For a quarter of a century, James Gordon Brown bestrode the world of British politics like a mighty colossus – for the last decade as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the most important member of Tony Blair's government after the Prime Minister himself.
Then a political tragedy occurred – in 2007 Brown was appointed Prime Minister in succession to Blair.
This is the post that Brown has coveted for his whole political life. Indeed, his obsessive need to become Prime Minister soiled his relationship with Tony Blair for years, turning the two into sworn enemies and dividing their Labour Party into two antagonistic camps that have maintained a state of conflict long after Blair moved on – ousted by Brown in a "palace coup".
The breeze could not have seemed fairer set for Brown as he took over the helm in 2007. The British electorate was tiring fast of Blair – the promise of the early days of the "New Labour" project lost in a unappealing brew of superficiality, falsehood, vanity, material greed, egoism, spin, and illegal wars.
And things did indeed start well. Brown's first weeks in power were punctuated by dreadful weather and the worst series of floods to have hit the country for fifty years. In reality there was nothing much that the new Prime Minister could do, but he stood tall and looked statesmanlike, and the British public reacted well.
From a long period in the doldrums, the Labour Party suddenly found itself once more with a lead in the polls. Brown oozed confidence, and an autumn election seemed a logical way to cement his credentials as Prime Minister.
At the Labour Party Conference in the summer of 2007 he taunted the opposition with hints. His spin-doctors briefed the media accordingly, and it was known that the Labour election machine was swinging into action, to the extent that nationwide billboard advertising reservations had already been made.
By autumn the whole of the country was in pre-election fever, a fever that had been assiduously stoked by Brown himself and his back-room briefers. His own forces were ready and willing to go.
Then something happened. It is not clear what. Certainly Tory leader David Cameron, with what appeared to be his last throw of the dice, made an inspired speech to his own Party Conference. A visit by Brown to the troops in Iraq at the same time was criticized as opportunistic and ill-considered. And rumour has it that private polls in key marginal constituencies suggested that Labour's lead was a good deal more fragile than it appeared. For whatever reasons, Brown began to have second thoughts.
A true leader would have quashed his own doubts, strapped on his armour, gird his loins, called on any waverers to take courage, and secure in his ability to win the day he would have placed himself at the head of his troops and charged into battle. Brown, having marched his men to the top of the hill, feebly marched them down again. He called the election off.
The assurance of the back-room election briefings gave way to a haze of ambiguity. In public Brown, looking increasingly timid, feeble, and foolish, tried in vain to present a preposterous case that he had never planned to hold an election in the first place. The electorate was first stunned, then baffled, then contemptuous. Brown was a coward – "Bottler Brown". Labour dropped in the polls. The first cracks began to appear.
His reputation never really recovered. The appalling international economic crisis went on to expose Brown's much-vaunted success as Chancellor as a figment of his own imagination – the UK in one of the worst positions of any developed country, according to the IMF. Bombastic claims of having "put an end to boom and bust" came back to ridicule him. Labour plunged in the polls. The unattributable talk was of a need to find a replacement to Brown.
