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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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, ...”

“... that the scheme would be discredited. One woman who had votes ‘dumped’ on her was Mildred Gordon, who, Harman says, ‘had not particularly made her mark’ in Parliament. She was ‘nearly elected’ (this isn’t true: she got 45 votes; the last person to be elected, John Prescott, got 85; Harman got 68) and was ‘amazed and happy … that at last ...”

“... he did not lead marches. Some politicians became friends (he got the bus with Michael Foot; Gordon Brown was a dinner guest) and in the late 1970s and 1980s he would catalyse a fierce and consequential debate about the future of the Labour Party through interventions in Marxism Today (interventions that were blamed for – and that Hobsbawm later ...”

“... half within four years. They haven’t spelled out how they are going to do it, and until recently Gordon Brown was talking about ‘Tory cuts versus Labour investment’ – which, given what he must know about what the figures mean, is jaw-droppingly cynical. The reality is that the budget, and the explicit promises of both parties, imply a commitment ...”

“... on Social Justice, set up by the Labour leader John Smith. The Commission was chaired by Sir Gordon Borrie, former Director General of Fair Trading, and a director of Mirror Group Newspapers, whose anti-trade union regime under David Montgomery was ushered in with the blessing of the Mirror’s new accountants, Arthur Andersen. Borrie’s introduction to ...”