Boom and bust for Gordon

Iain Martin examines Gordon Brown’s confident policies before and after disaster struck and finds them wanting

In a previous life, working on Scottish newspapers, I used to take delivery of the occasional article offered by Gordon Brown. The then Chancellor of the Exchequer or one of his aides would call— on the way to the airport from some important gathering — to check that the copy sent by Stone Age fax or then new-fangled email had arrived.

It had, I responded ruefully. The piece he had written for the opinion pages had most definitely arrived. It was lying there on my desk staring at me. More than a thousand words by Gordon Brown, waiting to be read.

Beyond the Crash is many times longer than the newspaper articles Brown bashed out. Yet even though the main body of his new book comes in at just 242 pages, in theory brief for a work from a recently retired leader, it feels, because of the content, much longer. Anyone who has had to listen to a sermon tinged with politics delivered by a Church of Scotland minister not blessed with an understanding of the importance of brevity will know the feeling.

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The concluding chapter of Beyond the Crash — ‘Markets need morals’ — even ends with Brown invoking the lessons he ‘first learned in my father’s church long ago’. Apparently these are timeless values dictating that riches are only of lasting value when they enrich not just some of us but all. He closes with this sentence: ‘These are the values of the peoples of the world. If we fight, we can make them the values of globalisation too.’

Are they the values of the peoples of the world? All of them? Is it is possible for Gordon Brown to know what the peoples of the world want, and arrange for them to have it? Meanwhile, back on planet earth, Beyond the Crash was billed as being Brown’s account of the global financial meltdown.