“... and George Canning can drive from their imagination the more recent feud between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, accounts of which made me thankful there are no firearms stored (within easy reach) at Downing Street. Duels are now fought with shouting matches, spin doctors and snide public allusions to ‘the bloke next door’. The toxic mix of ...”

“... think anyone was expecting – was that ten years would go by quite so fast. At the start of 2008, Gordon Brown was prime minister of the United Kingdom, George W. Bush was president of the United States, and only politics wonks had ever heard of the junior senator from Illinois; Nicolas Sarkozy was president of France, Hu Jintao was general secretary of ...”

“... ignoble at all. And today, 15 June, comes George Bush paying a courtesy call on the Queen and Gordon Brown before having a cheering conscience-free get-together with his old mate Tony Blair. And here are the helicopters flying over Regent’s Park to prove it. 26 June, Espiessac. I sit in the wicker rocking-chair in the shade of the willow by the ...”

“... the piece on ‘The Radical Literary Tradition’) – a fling at the Establishment which Gordon Brown, as a student at Edinburgh, had defied in the most practical way by getting elected as University Rector, then setting up the Special Publications Board which published the Red Paper and has recently evolved into the pioneering publisher ...”

“... The recent French presidential election rubbed the point in painfully; as has the elevation of Gordon Brown on this side of the Channel. Neither Roberto Unger nor Jacques Attali undervalues the achievements of social democracy, or indeed of state socialism. But both suggest that in either case any reprise or development now depends on finding a ...”

“... trust the Conservative Party to deal effectively with the economy than did so in May. John Smith, Gordon Brown and the Treasury team are the most impressive part of the Shadow Cabinet, but they are faced with voters perverse enough both to reward the Government for success and to trust it with recovery from self-induced failure. How can Labour ever ...”

“... elementary professional prowess. Paxman and Dimbleby might yearn, on our behalf, to find out what Gordon Brown conceals beneath his mask of stony moderation, or how Ash-down would shape up in a pub-brawl, but I’m not certain that the public greatly craves disclosures of this kind. Someone like Max Clifford will tell us that MPs make up for their ...”

“... that made them to some extent proof against their leader’s displeasure. With the exception of Gordon Brown, and possibly John Prescott, no member of the present cabinet has such standing. Ministers have no power bases within the party or the country and are largely unknown to the electorate. They owe their places in the cabinet almost entirely to ...”

“... enough self-made billionaires. It took Tony Blair to manage that (deregulation, baby), and in 2008 Gordon Brown introduced ‘golden visas’, which allowed swathes of high-net-worth individuals to enjoy what modern Britain had to offer. By 2013, the number one spot on the Rich List was held by Alisher Usmanov, the Russian metals magnate, with Roman ...”

“... with the latter. But Scottish voters proved a loyal bunch, especially to one of their own: Gordon Brown actually increased Labour’s vote share in Scotland by 2.5 per cent in 2010, against a drop of 6.2 per cent across the UK.The referendum result changed everything. In less than a year, Scottish politics reorganised itself around the new poles ...”

“... Labour’s own strange leadership election last year. The real contenders were Blair, Cook and Gordon Brown but the way in which the media immediately fastened on Blair as the favourite exerted enormous pressure on Cook and Brown: they had to be sure, before they started, that they could win, for if they ran and ...”

“... wanted to be as formidable as Thatcher had been, a steely woman in a world of wobbly men. Even Gordon Brown, with his ceaseless personal ambition, believed that politicians only get a few chances to make a lasting difference and he longed to take the opportunities on offer as effectively as she had. The fact that they all failed in these lofty goals ...”

“... there is now a crisis of leadership. ‘The only plausible alternative to Tony Blair is not Gordon Brown but Robin Cook,’ was Ross McKibbin’s challenging conclusion in the LRB last month – all members of the present Cabinet are thereby disqualified from the succession. But although Cook’s manifest vindication warrants his return to high ...”

“... foreign policies are merely their most dramatic manifestation. To Blair, and even more to Gordon Brown and his kitchen cabinet, America stands for ingenuity, dynamism, wealth and power. It is the model to which we should aspire. This view has always trumped Blair’s Europeanism and has effectively eliminated ‘Europe’ as a model for this ...”

“... In practice, such talk meant that politicians were trying to cut loose from their own parties. Gordon Brown, when he was chancellor, once dismissed a proposal from the trade unions to restore the link between pensions and average earnings; in the face of overwhelming support for the proposal at the Labour Party Conference, ...”