The riddle of Gordon Brown

Illustration by Steve O'Brien

“SAY what you like about Boris Yeltsin,” said one pithy obituarist of Russia's mercurial president, “and you're probably right.” Say what you like about Gordon Brown, it seems, and you'll eventually be right too. He is a tin-eared, cack-handed no-hoper, the anti-Midas of politics; but also, now, an economic seer, globalisation's therapist, lionised by the European media, saluted by leaders who once disdained him and hailed by the new Nobel economics laureate as the man who may have saved the world financial system. If Hollywood ever makes a film about the crash of 2008, Mr Brown may be the reviled but ultimately vindicated nerdy hero (played by Tom Hanks).

Two questions arise from this stunning metamorphosis—one about the future, and another, perhaps more vexing, about the past. The historical one is this: can the prime minister who had sunk beneath criticism into ridicule really be the same man who, last week, called for the world to emulate his bank-rescue package, and saw the world obey? Which is the real Mr Brown?

There are a couple of conveniently easy answers to this riddle. Some somersaulting left-wing commentators—who were for Mr Brown before they were against him, and are now for him again—explain his inconsistency and their own as the unpredictable result of historical lightning, an act of the political gods. Some in the right-wing commentariat, meanwhile, insist that Mr Brown's triumph has been chimerical. The crisis he apparently helped to ameliorate, they say, is actually his fault, at least as much as it is that of the nefarious bankers and irresponsible Americans whom he himself alternately blames. Moreover, Mr Brown and Alistair Darling, the chancellor, were slow to announce their recapitalisation plan, and will soon struggle with the politically awkward burden of controlling a big chunk of the banking sector. Some in this camp spy a revanchist Labour socialism to which, they believe, Mr Brown has always secretly subscribed.

Both these explanations are wrong. The latter is a classic example of what psychologists call cognitive dissonance: accustomed to seeing Mr Brown as “useless” (as David Cameron, the leader of the Conservatives, puts it), some observers find it impossible to acknowledge his success. But it is real: whatever his past mistakes, Mr Brown's tripartite plan for rescuing Britain's banks was bold, comprehensive and swiftly copied elsewhere. He and Mr Darling may have dithered for a day or two, but they were still speedier than other European leaders and the hapless Hank Paulson. And the idea that Mr Brown has been unrecognisably transformed is also mistaken. Mr Brown the flop, and Mr Brown the saviour of the universe, Bagehot submits, are more similar than they may at first appear.

In his response to the crisis, Mr Brown has demonstrated many of the traits that contributed to his ruination before. One is a fondness for plagiarism. He is a natural copycat, as he demonstrated to his cost last year when he imitated a sketchy Tory idea to ease inheritance tax by squeezing “non-doms”. But well-judged plagiarism can be a desirable, even an admirable, skill in a leader, as it is proving now. Mr Brown borrowed elements of Sweden's bank-rescue package of 1992, plus ideas advanced by the Tories and others, and worked them into a proposal that he victoriously presented as his own.

Next, Mr Brown's taste and fitness for austerity. For part of his short premiership, he tried—and failed—to proffer himself as the champion of a different abstract noun: aspiration. But he has always seemed constitutionally inclined to worry more about averting bad things (poverty, inequality and so on) than about making good things happen. His natural political costume is the hair shirt. Along has come a potential catastrophe, the partial aversion of which seems heroic rather than dully worthy.

Finally, Mr Brown finds himself in his natural element in macroeconomic meltdown, just as Tony Blair was in questions of liberal interventionism. He is not expected to emote or empathise or discharge any of the other awkwardly human duties of routine political leadership. Instead he can talk fluently about the lessons of past crises and his suddenly fashionable plans for reforming the global financial architecture. He can revert, in other words, to the staid but commanding persona he honed as chancellor. Another way of putting it is that Mr Brown can sail, for the moment, above ordinary politics. And it is lowly politics—positioning, spinning, over-promising—that got him into trouble.

Time for a change

The pressing question about the future is not really whether Mr Brown's crisis bounce will be high and lasting enough to win a general election. Although the stock of embattled politicians can evidently go up as well as down, that still seems unlikely; but the election will probably not come before 2010, by which point a recession will have intervened, with unpredictable consequences.

The pressing question is whether Mr Brown can become a lastingly effective prime minister. Leaders, like banks, run on a self-perpetuating cycle of confidence: seeming confident inspires the faith of voters, which in turn can free leaders to govern decisively. Mr Brown has been bold, and has been applauded for his boldness. Soon he will have to take decisions without the liberating urgency of emergency, and with an opposition no longer trapped, as oppositions often are in crises, between seeming irrelevant and seeming indecently opportunistic. Mr Brown's “bottling” of a snap election last autumn defined the politics of the year that followed; can he now sustain the political and intellectual momentum he has gathered in the forthcoming one?

Mr Brown is a complex man—talented and resilient as well as brooding and clumsy—whose virtues are inextricably bound up with his faults. Both the laughing stock and the deep-thinker are the real Mr Brown. Circumstances changed, not the prime minister. To prosper after the panic ebbs, he still needs to.