The tragedy of Gordon Brown - the forgotten Macbeth of British politics: A withering portrayal by Left-wing writer who turned ex-PM's failure into a stage play

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Created on Wednesday, 23 October 2013 00:00

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The tragedy of Gordon Brown - the forgotten Macbeth of British politics...

By Kevin Toolis

Nothing in his premiership so became him as the leaving of it. Who could fail to be moved when Gordon Brown walked out of Downing Street holding the hands of his two sons, with his wife Sarah, his head held high to go to the Palace to resign?

Or those last few honest, emotion-charged words on the doorstep of No 10 summarising his own troubled time in office.

'I have been privileged to learn much about the very best in human nature and a fair amount too about its frailties – including my own.'

But he was a failure as Prime Minister. I would even argue that he was our worst in 200 years. The reasons why this superbly capable, highly moral and in many ways thoroughly admirable man crashed as PM are psychologically fascinating on a personal level and profoundly important for British democracy.

I set out to find out why. I began by interviewing those of Brown's inner circle who would speak to me, including Ed Balls, Douglas Alexander, Damian McBride, his pollsters Deborah Mattinson and Stan Greenberg, his head of policy Spencer Livermore.

The result is a play, The Confessions Of Gordon Brown, which has its world premiere at this year's Edinburgh Festival before transferring to London's West End in September.

The answer in one word is – leadership.

In office, Gordon Brown failed to convince the nation, and many of his own MPs, that our future would be brighter under his command.

In particular, the southern English electorate never warmed to this Scottish bloke with a jowly neck and a rictus grin.

Unlike Tony Blair, Brown was not the sort of man they wanted to invite to a family barbecue. Or to vote for at the General Election. They never, out of simple human prejudice, liked him.

Election manifestos come and go but a true leader only ever sells one commodity – hope. And Brown failed badly at that basic task.

Blair, however sleazy he has become, always sold hope better. In a real-life Game Of Thrones, the prize of power that Gordon Brown had plotted and schemed for all his life eluded him even after he finally seized the crown from his usurper Tony Blair.

Like some ancient Greek hero, Brown ruined the better part of himself by his fateful indecision, a wilful denial of reality, and by the warped and dysfunctional court of acolytes he had created around him.

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Many of his finest moral qualities proved to be his greatest weaknesses. Brown's Scottishness, and the sense of a greater mission inherited from his Church of Scotland minister father, weighed heavily upon him and the infinite demands of the office of Prime Minister crushed him.

Tony Blair committed the nation to the worst foreign policy disaster – the invasion of Iraq – since the Second World War.

But every night Blair slept soundly in his Downing Street bed as suicide bombers wreaked slaughter on the streets of Baghdad.

In contrast, Brown beat himself up over the smallest political disaster, such as the November 2007 loss of child benefit details for millions of people by a junior HMRC postal clerk.

Unlike Blair, he failed to delegate and for much of his time in Downing Street he was physically exhausted.

Something else from his Scottish upbringing was to have an even more profound effect – the teenage accident on the rugby pitch that blinded Brown in one eye and seriously impaired his sight in the other.

Although he downplayed his sight loss, it had a key psychological effect on his political career. Enemies and opponents were often no more than blurs, and he was often accused of rudeness when he had failed to recognise an old colleague.

If Blair had gone in 2004, as Brown believed he had promised, the course of history would be very different. But Blair made Brown his numbering clock – every hour of Blair was one less hour of Brown.

Winning a historic fourth term was never going to be easy, and the long sacrifice of waiting turned many of Brown's positive ideals to stone.

His guerrilla operation to unseat Blair, the plots, the alcohol-fuelled briefings by his assassin henchmen, poisoned the well of his supporters within the Parliamentary Labour Party.

By 2007, the ablest of his lieutenants – even his crown prince, Ed Balls – were already forging their own careers.

Brown ascended the throne more like a Macbeth than Henry IV, and even without the greatest economic crisis of our lifetime, the first rebellions from within his own ranks were only a matter of time.

Like Shakespeare's Scottish warlord, Brown ruled alone. In fear. Weakened and beset by his own frailties and ultimately overcome by the forces he had himself unleashed.

One other reason why I wrote the play was to re-inject some drama into politics. So we decided to stage The Confessions at this year's Labour Party Conference in Brighton in September.

But our attempts to place an advert in the Labour Party Conference magazine received a point-blank refusal.

Ed Miliband – once a member of Brown's tiny court of fanatical followers – clearly wanted to stop Labour Party members from hearing about The Confessions Of Gordon Brown. I wonder why?

Ironically our play, with Brown played by Scottish actor Ian Grieve, has resulted in a real act of politics – a ban.

But in a real democracy like Britain politicians, flawed or failing, don't get to censor writers and actors.

So The Confessions Of Gordon Brown will go on and an incarnation of Gordon Brown, Labour's greatest failure, will be on stage at least in Brighton, to return like Banquo to the Conference feast.

We can never learn from our own history if we deny its very existence, and Labour is unlikely ever to return to power unless they examine what went so badly wrong for the greatest would-be leader who never was.

The Confessions Of Gordon Brown is at the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until August 26, London's Trafalgar Studios, September 3 – 28, and at The Old Courtroom, Brighton, Sept 22 – 24.

PUBLISHED: 11 August 2013

Source: The Mail Online UK