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“... don’t know what in practice he wants from public policy, and his destructive relationship with Gordon Brown, where the one cancels out the other, frustrates him all the more. The result is that caution and political immobilism have now become instinctive. His last serious intervention in domestic affairs was to declare his opposition to any kind of ...”

“... in Euroscepticism from Philip Gould’s focus groups and daily readings of the Sun and the Mail, Gordon Brown’s press secretary, Charlie Whelan, and his economic adviser, Ed Balls, sent the Times a fax hinting at a major policy change while Whelan tried to persuade the Sun to go with the headline ‘Brown Saves ...”

“... Gordon Brown has become prime minister with less seeming to be known about him, and what he thinks and believes, than almost any other holder of the office. As chancellor, he showed an exceptionally narrow concern with his brief and usually disclosed an opinion on anything outside it only if absolutely forced to ...”

“... But this is to over-individualise what has happened. If Blair went who could succeed him? Not Gordon Brown, a formidable personality, but all too often obstinate in the defence of bad ideas, and as much responsible for Labour’s failure to see just how financially decrepit our public institutions were (and are) as anyone. Not, obviously, any other ...”

“... desperation. Britain’s Labour Party, which had spurned at least three opportunities to replace Gordon Brown with someone more palatable, smelled of exhaustion. Laws describes the various meetings that took place in the days following the election between the Lib Dem negotiating team and its Labour counterparts, to see if they could thrash out a ...”

“... climate change has made one of its periodic appearances in the headlines, with David Cameron and Gordon Brown each making announcements about what he will do when in office. This amounts to a green beauty contest, with the public in the position of the pen-sucking judges. Cameron first. The Tory leader has hitherto, for all practical purposes, said ...”

“... bequeathed to him by Kenneth Clarke, one of the best Chancellors of the Exchequer since the war, Gordon Brown managed a respectable if unspectacular rate of growth without inflation and did so, remarkably, without running into an economic crisis. Yet he was lucky. Until the last few months he was greatly aided by a benign economic climate in the ...”

“... and student politicians. More problematic, and something difficult to predict, is what effect Gordon Brown will have as prime minister. When Blair will decide to go is anyway unknowable and Brown himself is not an ideal successor: see the London Underground. Furthermore, unlike Robin Cook, he is even less likely to ...”

“... Aberfan disaster to the death of David Kelly, Profumo to tabloid phone hacking. On 15 June 2009, Gordon Brown announced an inquiry into the Iraq war – to investigate, as Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry’s chairman, put it, ‘the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as ...”

“... criteria for deciding when scheming for party political advantage becomes ‘unconstitutional’. Gordon Brown would probably not be in the mess he currently is if the timing of elections was excluded from routine political calculation. When Brown flirted with calling an election last autumn, in order to take advantage ...”

“... Like many​ recent political memoirists, Gordon Brown begins his story in medias res. Given his rollercoaster time in Downing Street, punctuated by the gut-wrenching drama of the financial crisis, there should have been plenty of arresting moments to choose from. Some, though, are already taken. Alistair Darling, for instance, starts Back from the Brink, his 2011 account of what it was like being Brown’s chancellor, on Tuesday, 7 October 2008, when Sir Tom McKillop, the chairman of RBS, called him to announce that his bank was about to go bust and to ask what the government planned to do about it ...”

“... Independent Labour Party MP, socialist, orator, Scotsman and the subject of a biography written by Gordon Brown twenty years ago – was not a successful leader, although some of his contemporaries in the 1920s thought he might become one. ‘Maxton was never a government minister,’ Brown wrote of his subject, ‘and ...”

“... ministers leaving Parliament after a short interval (hours for Blair, five years for Major and Brown, with Cameron likely to follow suit) and party leaders quickly throwing in the towel after election defeats (Hague, Miliband, Clegg). The most recent generation of political leaders attained high office infinitely faster than their predecessors, serving no ...”

“... a one-man crusade against himself. The David Davis he is standing as, it turns out, is also the Gordon Brown of October 2007, who – after ‘reaching out’ across the ideological divide and seeking a ‘government that uses all the talents’ – gave a speech to the University of Westminster to set out his stall. ‘I want to talk today about ...”

“... lost his Midas touch.’ In October 2004, he carried the first of a long series of eulogies to Gordon Brown, then ‘odds-on to be prime minister before the end of 2008’. ‘The Brown transition,’ Goodhart wrote, ‘could help to realise the centre-left’s dream of governing Britain for a generation.’ What ...”