Gordon Brown’s plan to save the Union won’t wash

Back in 2006, when he was close to executing his masterplan to chase Tony Blair out of Downing Street, Gordon Brown sought to address something that worried many voters: his Scottishness. ‘My wife is from Middle England, so I can relate to it,’ he pronounced, as if Middle England were a town somewhere off the M40.

In fact, though Sarah Brown was born in Buckinghamshire, she spent most of her early childhood in Tanzania and her family moved to North London when she was seven. By mistaking a term denoting the provincial English psyche for a geographical area, Brown merely demonstrated that he was indeed all at sea.

He has never let that stop him from drawing up governmental systems that will allegedly solve the tensions inherent within the United Kingdom, a union of one highly populated country with three sparsely populated others. And now he is back at it, having been invited by Keir Starmer to spearhead Labour’s attempted fight back against Nicola Sturgeon.