Gordon Brown was prime minister of the United Kingdom between 2007 and 2010. For a decade before that, he managed the country’s finances as Chancellor of the Exchequer. His public persona projected a dour countenance, a son of the Manse (a house for Protestant clergy in Scotland), and an introspective intellectual who preferred a good book to idle chatter.
He was not a smooth charmer like his predecessor, collaborator, and rival, Tony Blair, but someone who was driven to change the world – and in particular, the shame of global child poverty and the scourge of third world debt.
Both Blair and Brown in their years in power ran redistributive governments and reduced the level of poverty in the UK. The subtitle of this latest biography, Gordon Brown: Power with Purpose (Bloomsbury 2026) by James Macintyre, says it all.
For the last half a century – before, in, and after high office – Brown has embraced unpopular and underpublicized causes and spoken truth to power. A complicated man with a reputedly “volcanic temper,” this world outlook has led him to defend the cause of the Jewish people, to speak out against populist racism, and align himself with the aspirations of the State of Israel.
His father, John Brown, was a teetotaling Church of Scotland minister who had worked among the poor of Glasgow and around the Govan shipyards.
Minister Brown learned Hebrew and led many visits of his parishioners to Israel, beginning in the 1960s. Macintyre notes that these pilgrimages profoundly influenced his 12-year-old son, Gordon, to write his first article in the local church magazine, titled “Persecution,” in which he described “the unspeakable carnage” meted out to the Jews by the Nazis.
Young Brown further commented that “our debt to the Jews is very great.”
Like the offspring of other Protestant clergymen such as Angela Merkel and Theresa May, Brown did not relate to the zeal of the “good news” doled out by the American evangelicals and their missionaries.
His role model was Jimmy Carter, who as US president had helped the Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union. As the author comments, Gordon Brown’s “social Christianity” and sense of self-sacrifice reflected his deep religious beliefs and his disgust at intolerance.
Brown’s moral vision and support for Israel
Brown forged a lasting friendship with then-UK chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks. The author notes that Brown was widely credited by many international leaders with “saving the world” during the financial crisis of 2008-2009. It was also a point in time when he relied on Rabbi Sacks, pointing out that “this was not simply a financial crisis but a moral crisis.” Brown commented: “Bankers had awarded themselves bonuses they didn’t deserve, had taken risks they didn’t understand, and people were buying goods they couldn’t afford.”
In April 2009, Brown gave the first speech in St. Paul’s Cathedral in Central London by a serving prime minister. He later revealed that much of the speech had been written by Sacks.
Three months later, Brown visited Israel and addressed the Knesset. He alluded to his coming of age in the small industrial town of Kirkcaldy on the eastern coast of Scotland:
“Kirkcaldy is some 3,200 km. from Jerusalem – but for me, they are closely linked. Not in their landscapes and certainly not their weather but in the profound impact of your early statehood years on my childhood.”
He had been genuinely shocked on visiting Yad Vashem, despite his knowledge of the Holocaust, and mentioned in his Knesset speech the courageous work of Swedish diplomat Raul Wallenberg in saving Hungarian Jews.
He paid tribute to Tommy Lapid, the well-known Israeli journalist and Knesset member who had just passed away, and recalled that Lapid’s bar mitzvah had taken place in terrible circumstances in wartime Budapest.
Brown told the assembled members of the Knesset: “You are the children of the sacrifices of your parents and grandparents.”
The founders of the British Labour movement, such as Keir Hardie, were actually Scottish rather than English. They were seen as role models and were deeply respected by many of the early Zionist leaders, such as Moshe Sharett and David Ben-Gurion. Ramsay MacDonald, who later became the first Labour prime minister, visited the Yishuv in the early 1920s.
The author notes that Brown related strongly to James Maxton, another Scot on the Left of the Labour Party. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Maxton, whom Churchill regarded as “the greatest parliamentarian of his day.”
While Brown admired Maxton’s brilliant rhetorical skills, he was also clear that adhering to “an ideological purity, at the cost of political impotence, served no one.” Brown was also interested in the writings and ideas of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned by Mussolini.
He opposed figures such as Tony Benn on the ideological Left of Labour. He “intensely disliked” Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, who published his Labour Herald journal on printing presses allegedly paid for by Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Livingstone was famously boorish toward Jewish supporters of Israel in the UK, and was profoundly ignorant about Zionist history.
In July 2019, Brown addressed the rising tide of anti-Jewish sentiment in the Labour Party during the tenure of Jeremy Corbyn. Brown argued that Labour owed the Jewish community in the UK “an unqualified apology.” Indeed, he was so upset at what had come to pass, that he joined the Jewish Labour Movement as an affiliate member – and advised other Labour leaders to do so as well.
Brown clearly distinguished between the government of Israel and the State of Israel – and has clashed with the Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu on a number of occasions.
In stark contrast, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the UK accused him of abetting “war crimes.”
The author argues that if Brown had been prime minister at the time, the UK would not have been drawn into the ill-fated war in Iraq in 2003 – just as Harold Wilson had kept the UK out of the Vietnam War despite American entreaties. Yet Brown voted to support Blair in committing British troops but later implied that he was wrong to do so – even if he was not involved in the planning.
Unlike many other British prime ministers, he does not live in London but has returned to the family home in the Fife village of North Queensferry in Scotland with its panoramic views.
In the view of the author, while Brown could often be “difficult, obstructive and needlessly suspicious,” he is “a man aware of his own flaws.”
He remains, at the age of 75, someone who continues to grapple with public reality and not with public relations. Only last week, Brown was appointed as a special envoy on global finance by Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The tabloid press in the UK has tried hard to find some dirt on him and his family through alleged phone hacking and surveillance by private detectives, but to no avail.
This book is an unauthorized but comprehensive account of Brown’s journey through life.
Macintyre has painted a portrait of an unusual man, dwelling in the political bear pit alongside villains and opportunists – although more could have been said about his philosemitism and his “pro-Israel instincts” in this very interesting book. Even so, it is nevertheless a portrait of a man who has refused to rest on his laurels but continues to stand up for the moral values of religion in dark times. ■
GORDON BROWN:
POWER WITH PURPOSE
By James Macintyre
Bloomsbury Publishing
336 pages; $23