The Weird Legacy of Gordon Brown

​ In modern ​politics, standing down as an MP doesn't signal the dignified end of a life in public service, it signals the undignified continuation of a life grabbing whatever money the consultancy and after-dinner speaking game can throw your way. Just look at Tony Blair. He hasn't been an MP since 2007 but he's still out there week in, week out, lending his services to corrupt regimes across the world, topping up his tan and collecting awards.

Gordon Brown's decision to step down as an MP seems a little different, though. It's one of the defining narratives of the former Prime Minister that he's a serious man who thinks serious thoughts. And so to hear that he's leaving public service doesn't conjure up images of private jets to five-star hotels in the Middle East. It paints a picture of Brown sitting at a mahogany desk in a leather-bound armchair, writing economic treatises in fountain pen as the Scottish winter closes in outside.

The one-time chancellor has loomed large in our political consciousness for two decades. He'll be remembered for a number of things but as a man never shy about his own supposedly massive intellect, this impression of him as a 19th century thinker and preacher is still one that holds, though it has come and gone. If Blair was the frontman, then Brown was the guitarist with mystique, the guy we all thought was the real brains behind the band. While Blair looked good on camera, Brown looked like a guppy fish trying to find a way out of the tank it had been dropped into.

As Prime Minister, the harder Gordon tried to get rid of his mannerisms, the worse it became. For a time, you could see him physically trying to restrain himself from doing his toad impression and by the time everyone had decided to just "let Gordon be Gordon" it was too late.

He was, we were told, a politician out of time. If only we could go back to the old days when big beasts roamed the chambers of British politics, then a man like Brown could have been truly appreciated. Those were the days in which a man could look like he'd been found in a dark corner of a subterranean library and still lead a political party, days in which the television was a small box owned by 5 percent of the population, had only one channel and played only monologues by middle-aged Etonians.

Brown played up to this image of himself in his farewell speech delivered, appropriately, at the Old Kirk in Kirkcaldy, the oldest church in his constituency town. Standing in this thick-walled seat of tradition, Brown looked solid and three-dimensional, a true thinker and public servant in an age dominated by PR and the cutthroat logic of the market. It's worth quoting from him at length because, if you take it at face value, what he says should be believed in:

"If sometimes and too often, politics itself is seen, at best, as a branch of the entertainment industry, if at times political parties are seen not as agents of change but as brands to be marketed to people who are seen as consumers when they are really citizens with responsibilities, then I still hold to the belief in something bigger than ourselves, and I still hold to the belief in the moral purpose of public service."

Farewell speeches, though, may simply reveal how people would like to be remembered, not how they really behaved. More cynically, they may just be an attempt to rewrite history in order to convince people that they were, all along, the best version of themselves. Rather than being a public servant unconcerned with brands and distrustful of consumerism, those who worked under Brown when he was Prime Minister say that one of his defining obsessions was asking for "announceables". "Today I can announce" was a typical Brown phrase.

It's hard, too, to be entirely convinced by his distrust of consumerism when it was Brown who gave London's financial institutions free rein, allowing them to get ever richer on ever more unstable foundations so that he could continue to spend his way to ruin before then being credited with saving the world economy.

But then, not quite being the man you say you are is hardly unusual for anyone, let alone a politician. Once Brown finally got his hands on the top job he went from being the serious right-hand man plotting the downfall of his increasingly morally compromised leader, to being a gawping Prime Minister constantly assailed by his own public image.

He's charming in real life, people say, but that charm rarely translates to the screen. In a world of politicians that are increasingly bland and increasingly hard to impersonate, Brown, with his strange tongue-in-mouth thing, his squinting and his palpable unease at being in front of a camera, was a  ​gift for telly impressionists like Rory Bremner.

There seems to be something very typical about the arc of Brown's political career: the early zeal, the desire to help others and think big, the growing fixation with power, the failure to know what to do with it once it was obtained, the flailing in the public eye leading to a concern with image, the paranoia and then, once it's all over, the freedom of being let go. He was a surprisingly handsome young man of the left, full of ideas and concern for his fellow citizens but power, as we all know, does funny things to a guy.  ​Stories of him being a rage-filled micro manager so fixated on his sinking ship that he roamed around Number 10, grumbling about why the doors to the Cabinet room were locked, got out. By the end his reputation even as a serious and capable public servant, let alone a visionary leader, was under threat.

His speech in the run-up to the Scottish referendum was heralded across the country. He's a real politician, not like that dweeb Miliband, we all thought, forgetting that we all used to think Gordon was just as weird as "weird Ed". Perhaps what Brown's referendum speech and heartfelt hymn to public service in Kirkcaldy really show is something deeper. That once the pressure to play the party political game is off, and once there is no longer any need to conform to the public's contradictory demands for a real thinker who is also blandly appealing, modern politicians can say something of real value.

In the end, Brown was both the 19th century-style serious thinker and the gawping laughing stock, fit only for  ​taking ice creams from Tony Blair. While Gordon may be set to give lectures around the world, we're unlikely to see him jet about in quite such a rapacious pursuit of cash-for-anything as Blair. That may be partly because he's less of a draw: he made a ​mere £1.4 million in his first year out of office compared to Blair's £20 million that year.

His website says that he's writing a book, modestly  ​titled, "2025: SHAPING A NEW FUTURE". Ideas include computers being important and more people going to university. The blurb even more modestly states, "While his passion, vision and overwhelming sense of fairness for all are what inspires organisations and global leaders, he is never afraid to take action." The book has been on the cards since 2012. Maybe at last, writing a treatise away from Westminster as the Scottish winter closes in outside, Gordon can finally be Gordon.

​@oscarrickettnow

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