Review: Gordon Brown. Power with Purpose, by James Macintyre

At long last, Gordon Brown, a towering figure over the last four decades of British politics, has the erudite and compelling political biography his career merits. James Macintyre, a political writer and former journalist, deftly probes the intricacies of the former Chancellor and Prime Minister's character, while examining Brown's contribution to revitalising the ideology and policy prospectus of the Labour Party in the post-Thatcherite age. Too many political biographies indulge in hero worship or pour vitriol on their subject. The author of Gordon Brown: Power with Purpose avoids that trap; Macintyre remains sympathetic, yet is unafraid to pose searching questions.

Throughout, Brown is portrayed as a gifted politician propelled by an abiding commitment to public service, blended with personal ambition and an almost unquenchable thirst for power. Even so, Macintyre documents how in the aftermath of John Smith's untimely death in 1994, Brown stands aside from the contest, negotiating an infamous deal with Tony Blair that nonetheless poisons relationships at the apex of the Labour Party for the next two decades.

The historically significant question that emerges is whether it would have been preferable for Brown and Blair to run against one another. The conventional view is that it was misguided for both ‘modernising’ candidates to enter the race, a repetition of the fatal error committed in the 1976 leadership election when Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crosland stood against each other—an act that proved ultimately self-defeating for Labour's revisionist tendency.

The alternative view is that the party would have benefitted from being forced to make a decisive choice between Blair and Brown. The result would have conferred legitimacy on the victor, thereby avoiding the damaging rows that plagued the era of the ‘TB/GBs’. More fundamentally, it would have required both candidates to elaborate with greater clarity what they meant by ‘modernisation’ in the context of mid-1990s Britain, spelling out the implications for Labour's policy and political appeal.

Macintyre cleverly highlights the dilemmas that confronted the party's modernisers as they sought to respond to the political dominance of Thatcherism in the 1980s, followed by the devastating election defeat of 1992. In a revealing passage, Brown acknowledges that too much energy was expended on attacking the policies of their Conservative opponents, instead of elaborating a coherent intellectual vision of British social democracy that mirrored the clarity of the revisionist analysis promulgated by Crosland, Healey, Jenkins and Hugh Gaitskell in the late 1950s. Labour eventually won power in 1997, but it was less well prepared than it might otherwise have been, as critical questions of policy and ideological direction remained unresolved.

While many conventional historical accounts of the period portray Blair as the fervent reformer and Brown as the party traditionalist, Macintyre reveals the extent of Brown's commitment to the ideological and organisational revitalisation of the labour movement. Brown was more than willing to challenge and confront his party, telling MPs and activists that after four successive defeats ‘Labour's priorities were out of date and out of sync with those of the electorate’. On constitutional questions, he eschewed the traditional Labour belief that reform of political institutions is a distraction from the central task of overhauling British capitalism and the pursuit of material equality, becoming a passionate advocate of Scottish devolution. In the 1983 leadership contest, Brown supported Neil Kinnock, the ‘soft left’ candidate of the Tribune group, rather than Roy Hattersley, the contender of the party's ‘traditional right’.

In the 1992 election, Brown fought to make the focus of the Labour campaign economic credibility (echoing Bill Clinton's slogan, ‘it's the economy, stupid’) rather than the state of the National Health Service and enacting Proportional Representation for the House of Commons. Brown's internal popularity unduly suffered because, as Shadow Chancellor, in order to bolster Labour's reputation for economic competence and fiscal discipline he refused colleagues' demands for more public spending. He declared that the party in future would be ‘wise spenders, not big spenders’. In office, disagreements over public sector reform, notably NHS foundation hospitals and the introduction of university tuition fees, owed more to misunderstanding and turf wars between the Treasury and Whitehall departments than ideological resistance on Brown's part.

Despite having coveted the position for so long, Brown's premiership from 2007 is widely regarded as a missed opportunity, notwithstanding the government's muscular response to the Great Financial Crisis. Labour then lost its parliamentary majority in 2010 in the face of growing political unpopularity, in part the price of incumbency after thirteen years in office. Yet, the Conservatives were still unable to win the election outright. Predictably, Nick Clegg decided to take the Liberal Democrats into coalition with David Cameron, even though there were many doubters on his own side, not least the former party leaders, Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy (as well as, in private, the future Business Secretary, Vince Cable). The traumatic experience of governing in coalition with the Conservatives led the Liberal Democrats to the catastrophic election defeat of 2015.

Yet, by the time of the 2010 election, Brown was constructing a more convincing progressive prospectus for the UK's future that would have served as a powerful antidote to austerity and Brexit. At its core was the belief that the UK should continue to play a leading role in Europe. A further phase of constitutional reform would decentralise power, eradicate the final vestiges of hereditary privilege, and secure fair votes. The purpose was to entrench a modern high-wage, high-skill economy in Britain underpinned by the commitment to inclusion and social justice in the name of equal citizenship.

The author reiterates that Brown was willing to stand aside as Prime Minister in the aftermath of the general election if it meant an alternative centre-left administration became a serious prospect. The extent of Labour's defeat in 2010 meant that the arithmetic in the House of Commons for such a pact was never viable—even if Plaid Cymru and Northern Ireland's Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP)  were prepared to cooperate—ending ‘the dream of a progressive alliance’. Nonetheless, it hardly seems unreasonable to surmise that Britain would have been better off if Brown's governing agenda had prevailed (as surely most Liberal Democrats now accept).

Macintyre's fascinating work is a reminder of why political biography remains a fertile genre. Biographical accounts afford unrivalled access to the dynamics of personal relationships in politics, alongside the wider context of institutions and ideas. The biography may not provide quantitative data or predictive models, yet it offers unique insight into the intricate motives of politicians, and how they seek to align power and purpose in pursuit of the noble ambition to change their country for the better.

Gordon Brown: Power with Purpose, by James Macintyre. Bloomsbury Publishing. 336 pp. £25