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“... Where do we go from here? It’s pretty clear that Gordon Brown doesn’t know and that Alistair Darling and the other members of the cabinet don’t either. Nor, it seems, does anyone else. It was much easier to predict that something nasty was going to happen than it is to know now when and how the nastiness will end ...”

“... would be to keep spending, forget the reforms and shut up: something Hewitt might tell Blair and Brown if she can summon the nerve. The Clarke affair is nastier and shows the government, the prime minister and the political elite generally in about as bad a light as possible. It was probably inevitable that the Home Office would eventually undo so many ...”

“... of which was too much even for Parliament, and did a lot to damage the reputation of the Blair and Brown governments. After the 2001 election Blair decided that Robin Cook was insufficiently on message and replaced him with Straw, which meant that Straw was in the Foreign Office throughout the Iraq War. It would be testing for any autobiographer to explain ...”

“... of view.’ Those are words Pietersen would never write. Keane is not Kevin Rudd. He’s more like Gordon Brown, a brooding, difficult presence, not someone you’d much want to be stuck in a lift with but a player you would always prefer to have on your team. When Keane left Manchester United he didn’t leave chaos behind him: it was a clean break and ...”

“... is ‘a very clever guy’ and José María Aznar ‘a tough guy’ (a mark of approval). Only Gordon Brown – ominously for him – is ‘a strange guy’. Other character assessments are equally breezy. ‘She is a great person, Tessa [Jowell], just a gem.’ Mandela can be ‘fly as hell’. Princess Anne ‘does a huge amount of largely unnoticed ...”

“... services. But the Treasury can hardly be accused of being self-deceived by acting in this way: Gordon Brown is not like those 16th-century Spanish monarchs who insisted that the interest payments on their debts should be left off their accounts because they found it too demeaning to be reminded of them. Brown is ...”

“... narrative, favoured by Labour, often goes by the name ‘anti-austerity’. In this account, Gordon Brown didn’t borrow or spend excessively at all. The British economy faltered in 2008 not because of borrowing and spending by the state but because of borrowing and lending by a handful of bloated, arrogant British banks. A country with its own ...”

“... Young as minister without portfolio in 1984, but the Labour administrations of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown made much more use of the practice of outside appointments, with Brown appointing Peter Mandelson in 2008 as secretary of state for business and then in 2009 as ‘first secretary of state’, a title that was ...”

“... point. Ferguson notes that in Blair’s memoirs he wrote that he had asked my opinion on sacking Gordon Brown when he was prime minister and Gordon was next door in No. 11. My recollection is that Tony wasn’t specific about Gordon. His question was about superstars and how I dealt ...”

“... implausibly optimistic. ‘There can be only one winner: democracy and a strong Afghan state,’ Gordon Brown predicted in his most recent speech on the subject. Obama and Brown rely on a hypnotising policy language which can – and perhaps will – be applied as easily to Somalia or Yemen as Afghanistan. It misleads ...”

“... that all three are of Scottish ancestry, as is the current Conservative pretender, Michael Gove. Gordon Brown was born in Scotland, went to university there and has represented only Scottish constituencies: and this unalloyed Scottishness undoubtedly worked against him in sectors of the English media and electorate. Conversely, although four generations ...”

“... of what was by then the Financial Services Authority, after the system had been rejigged by Gordon Brown under the mantra of ‘modernisation’. But the problems posed by conflicting objectives, uncertain penalties, overlapping responsibilities and ever more ingenious financial products were, and are, still there. My learning curve at the SIB was ...”

“... Netherlands. But when the votes were counted, it became clear that things weren’t going to plan. Gordon Brown might take some consolation from Cowen’s troubles: he had been barely a month in the job. Whatever hopes Ahern may have cherished that his self-sacrifice would be rewarded with a plum EU position disappeared. The Lisbon vote revealed a ...”

“... 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 ...”