The one and only Gordon Brown

Bagehot in The Economist makes the sensible—but overlooked—point that Brown’s strengths are his weaknesses and vice-versa:

“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.

Most popular

Alexander Larman

Beware the middle of Lidl

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.