Gordon Brown, who is in the news this weekend having come out against assisted dying, occasionally has a tendency to hold back. He held back from standing against his close friend John Smith for the Labour party leadership in 1992, though that was always an unlikely prospect. More agonisingly, he held back from running against Tony Blair for the same role in 1994, sacrificing his personal ambition for the New Labour cause. He even held back from the No campaign in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, at one point telling a friend ‘They don’t need me,’ until the 11th hour when he tilted the balance and helped save the UK union.
Brown was careful to avoid referring to religious arguments
And in a similar vein, he has over the years drafted a number of interventions that he never pressed send on. Some of these, including an eventually withheld controversial chapter from his own memoirs, will feature in a new biography I’m writing on the former prime minister who, according to recent YouGov
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