John Lloyd on an intellectual in power
Iain McLean on other intellectual prime ministers throughout history
Daniel Johnson on Brown the unsophisticated bookworm
Geoff Mulgan on the American inspiration behind Brown's thinking
Richard Cockett on the question of Brown's religious faith
Kamran Nazeer on Brown's book Courage
Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect's new blog
Courage: Eight Portraits, by Gordon Brown
(Bloomsbury, £16.99)
How odd—after ten years in waiting, to bring out a book a few weeks before becoming prime minister, a book that is neither autobiography, chronicling the path to power, nor manifesto, setting out how power will be used. Instead, Gordon Brown has published a collection of eight profiles in courage. None of his subjects is a predecessor in the role of prime minister, and few even held government positions. Does this book tell us anything at all about the intellectual outlook of the primus inter pares as he enters No 10?
The opening lines of the first portrait, of the nurse Edith Cavell, certainly seem heavy with hidden meaning: "In every life there are moments when decisions taken set in train a sequence of events that ultimately seal a fate." As it turns out, this is Brown's credo for writing history. Courage is, very firmly, a history book in which the choices made by individuals are pre-eminent. There is little discussion of social forces or even ideology, although he does talk of three types of courage: career heroes (armed forces, emergency services); "situational heroes," people who unexpectedly do something heroic; and "sustained altruists" who devote long periods of their lives to great causes. In the chapter on Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who rescued Jews from Budapest as Eichmann sought to march them to camps, Brown comments that "none of the testimonies of Wallenberg either before his mission or during it suggest that he was a natural-born hero." He acted in the way that he did, Brown says, because of inspiration—a situational hero. Mandela is depicted as "the solitary man." Aung San Suu Kyi is "lonely." There is no room in this book for other people, or for the ideas that may help to form an individual's moral orientation.
We might say that this makes for a very traditional, even conservative, work of history, in the sense that the people whose lives it describes are never glimpsed through the eyes of people who disliked them, or in the context of choices that failed or were poorly judged. This book is no hagiography, but it does not aspire to present a balanced or critical view. However, this is not a book about the trials and tribulations of people in power; it is a study of people mainly without power. Clearly it is no bad thing for Brown to be struck by the nobility of powerlessness and struggle. At the very least, we can guess that he does not regard the state as an exclusive, or even primary, repository of wisdom, and that he is at least as interested in the exercise of moral judgement as he is in the craft of government.
Another clue as to why Brown has written the book comes in the penultimate portrait, of Cicely Saunders, a doctor who founded the hospice movement for the terminally ill. Brown immediately notes that "there is another, more personal, aspect to Cicely Saunders's courage: her courage to love what she must lose." He is referring to the fact that Saunders twice fell in love with men suffering from incurable cancer. In the conclusion, Brown reveals that he is also referring to the death of his first child, Jennifer, who "lived only briefly, filled our lives with love, and all too soon left us to aching sorrow."
Brown, we suddenly realise, is "the solitary man," and this book represents his own attempt to recover courage. This book is the deeply felt response of a bookish man—he says that Courage has taken years to write—to the death of his child. I cannot imagine Blair or Clinton making the same choice. They would have spoken immediately about their loss. Brown is clearly different—more private, of course, and yet willing to publish this personal meditation. What is striking is that he has transformed his suffering into a lesson, and it is that suffering and the learning that follows it that qualifies him to teach.
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