So what does Gordon really think?
I mentioned yesterday a documentary I've made for Radio Four called What Does Gordon Really Think? You can hear it by clicking 
here - but you might be wondering why we put the programme together.
The reason is simple: Gordon Brown's character and views are now under the most intense scrutiny. They are all that could stand in the way of him fulfilling not just his dream but what he’s long believed is his destiny. For more than a decade political journalists, like me, have obsessed about the Blair/Brown dynamic (who, by the way, would now argue that it didn’t matter or that we were making it all up?) Now though the question that needs to be answered is what the man who would be Britain's next prime minister would be like in the job.
In the years BC (Before Clarke), no-one who really counted would go on the record to list the alleged character flaws which until then had only filled journalists notebooks anonymously. Now in the weeks AD (After the Disaster) they’ve gone silent again.
David Blunkett discloses that Brown is so driven that he sometimes barely sleeps or eats : “I was sitting next to him in Cabinet bemoaning that I’d only had five hours sleep and Gordon thought that was rather a lot. If he’s got an idea in his head, he’ll be up writing, scribbling. When you stay with Gordon and Sarah…Sarah has to drag him out from his study in order to be able to eat. He’s politics, politics, politics”. That’s proof to some of Gordon Brown's commitment and dedication. It’s evidence for others that he's an obsessive and is psychologically flawed.
So, friends and foes agree that Gordon Brown isn't an easy man to work with. What divides them is whether they believe his other qualities make the effort worthwhile. That and their hopes or fears about what Gordon really thinks.
At the root of Brown’s views are the teachings of his father. The themes of the Reverend John Brown's collected sermons are recognisably Brown-ite - “Towards set objectives”, “Making the best use of time” and "The vision of duty". As a young man Gordon Brown wrote about the need to tackle the gap "between what people are and what they have it in themselves to become". Neil Kinnock has a neat way of summing up that mission. He labels him not “Capability Brown” but “Justice Brown”
So, what might “Justice Brown” do in office? His political challenge will be to convince voters there's been a change from the Blair years whilst reassuring his party that there's enough continuity to counter charges of betrayal. The agenda for change is becoming increasingly clear.
First, a package of reforms designed to break Labour's reputation for spin, sleaze and control freakery. Brown has spoken of the need to re-invigorate the constitutional reform agenda - giving Parliament the power to declare war, completing the reform of the House of Lords and devolving more power to the regions and to local councils. Brown believes that his decision to make the Bank of England independent restored trust in the setting of interest rates by preventing politicians interfering. He’s now considering repeating the trick for the running of the NHS. The government would still set the overall budget and strategic policy but a new independent NHS Board could take over the day to day running of the health service.
Those hoping for an end to Blair’s wars or a libertarian shift away from Blair’s laws are likely to be disappointed. Yet, alongside the war on terror there’s likely to be a war on the global poverty which Brown believes feeds support for terrorism. The chancellor has campaigned to wipe out third world debt. Less well known is his proposal for an economic plan for the Middle East. “Justice Brown” believes that economics lies at the root of most problems. Brown’s known to be scathing of Tony Blair’s handling of the EU - believing it to be long on charm and short on strategy. One prediction by Ed Balls, a close ally and fellow Treasury minister, is likely to send a shiver around Brussels and produce a groan in the Foreign Office. Balls told me that Brown’s negotiating style will mirror Margaret Thatcher’s before hastily adding “in the early years” (the years she got “Britain’s money back” and helped shape the single market) Balls says :
“Going to an international meeting, the easiest thing to do is draft a fudge communique and go home, but if you want to make change that’s not good enough. It’s the people who are banging the table and saying ‘it’s not good enough, we’ve actually got to do something’, they’re the change makers.”
The issue that has most divided Gordon Brown from Tony Blair is public service reform. Brown has been infuriated by the endless talk of the “need for reform” fearing that it has undermined morale in the NHS and risks convincing the public that only privatisation will cure the health service’s ills. What is not yet clear is whether as prime minister he’d merely change the rhetoric or the reforms themselves. It’s an uncertainty fuelled by a speech he gave – or rather didn’t quite give - to a private dinner at the TUC Conference. Journalists were told he would make a statement of unequivocal support for Tony Blair's NHS reforms. It would have been an important signal had he said it. No-one I’ve spoken to can recall him saying that or anything like it.
For the dozen years since Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party, Gordon Brown’s ideas have been shrouded – sometimes by baffling jargon, occasionally by tactical silence, always by a tendency to work through ideas in secret with a few close friends before springing surprises on voters and colleagues alike. There may not now be much longer to find out what he really thinks.
I'm 
Comments
Didn't I just read this in this morning's Times? Nick's commitment to recycling is clearly impeccable.
You said you were trying to figure out what makes him tick?..You showed a photo of him smiling like a crocodile recently...Clearly then, he is "Tic Toc the Croc" ...come back to haunt us from Peter Pan.
Nick I fear Gordon may be worried, if he has any sense. Or is he that thick? I thick not.
I suppose the problems for Mr brown are quite acute. The Blair legacy for Gordon is like a minefield. He faces belligerent voters in the next few years who have every reason not to trust new labour, voters conditioned to say one thing and do another, just like government. And Mr Brown is someone who wants to play the game straight. He is indeed less flexible than the slippery Toady Blair (sorry I have a cold presently). In his close association with Blair, Brown has done well to insulate and keep his public personae low key, so as he emerges from the ashes like some Scottish Phoenix, he may come to life, or just smoulder and phut about.
How can Mr Brown separate himself from the fiendish clutches of his best mate? The albatross of Europe, the one who felt his next job was in International Foreign fields, and has done himself a mischief in being the yapping apologist for young Bush across the pond?
As Blair goes down like a lead balloon, the Political Titanic that labour allowed to take the reins, well I wonder what Labour, the actual party feel about this? Abandon them both?
I reckon that Mr Brown has probably a more slender chance to get his bulky frame into Number 10 properly, and not just be camping out upstairs as the pretender to the throne.
His mate Toady, he is actually as arrogant and misguided in his attitudes now as ever he was. And Blairite roustabouts are likely to offer spoilers to make Gordy’s route to the Crown quite difficult. The resurrection and development of thingy, what’s his name Reid (you know that twit who suggests stupid things to our diverse groups of UK citizens), he may think he has a chance. I’d like to see Reid go try that with National Front Mum’s and Dad’s, what a Home Secretary he’s turned out to be!
Overall, Gordon may have shot his bolt by keeping close to Blair. And Blair has nowhere to go either. Who wants either of them now? They are themselves a travelling security risk for ever more, and that really is a tragedy for them and for us!
Gordon Brown will have one or two huge disadvantages when Prime Minister which will lead to his downfall. He refuses to deal with the West Midlothian question or alter the Barnett formula.
At last the people of England are waking up to the huge and unfair way they are being treated. Scot M.P,s voting on matters affecting only the English and giving us top up fees and other fiscal advantages enjoyed in Scotland but not England.
The Barnett formula giving each person in Scotland £1800 more per head of taxpayers money when compared to the English.Hence No care fees for the elderly in Scotland when compared to England at £25000 per year !!
This will make Gordon Brown very unpopular and Blair knows this.Hence the battle within the Labour Party to stop him and find a more viable and acceptable candidate!!
Obsessed & working till all hours? That’s nothing new. Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher come to mind. Speaking of whom, a bit of old fashioned British table banging might not go amiss (particularly with a certain US administration), although I have just ruined my weekend by trying to imagine Gordon Brown wielding a handbag.
And a committed assault on global poverty as the keystone to British foreign policy would be welcome. But we also badly need a refreshed Libertarian approach to our multicultural society, acknowledging risk, emphasising freedoms over controls and restrictions, and individual responsibilities as well as rights.
As to the NHS and devolving power and responsibility to public services; there is just a tiny difference between the NHS and the Bank of England – the Bank of England does not depend upon public funding, raised by the government through taxation. The cynical among us might argue that devolving power and responsibility to an independent NHS Board is actually government, whose responsibility it is to allocate the public funds required to provide a service to meet public need, abrogating its own responsibility; hiding behind more layers of bureaucracy to avoid being taken to task over their own ultimate accountability. In other words, another Wizard Wheeze, masquerading as health policy, which will allow a government, of whatever colour to avoid having to come clean about the fact that the NHS, as we want it to be, is unaffordable. If that is, in fact what it is, one might even find the Tories in favour of the Wheeze, or even Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary claiming that it had originally been their idea!
Of course, what I am sure Gordon Brown will REALLY want to do is to have regular negotiations between the Department of Health and the NHS Board out of which will come a series of agreed and unequivocal public statements about just what the NHS can and will provide and, more crucially, what it will not. Because this would allow the public to be able to see straight away what deficiencies were the fault of NHS management at national and local level and which ones are inescapably the responsibility of government.
Yes, I am sure that must be what he intends to do!
Hi Nick
I'm sure he is a fascinating man. However, I do feel slightly uncomfortable with reports today (including your bit on the Radio 4 news) that he is set to announce a his NHS policy ideas. It smacks to me of "i've got the job in the bag". That may well be the case, but that, along with everything else has rather put me off him... Sorry, Gordon.
IT SEEMS TO ME THAT GORDON BROWN IS A PROFESSIONAL; POLITICIAN IN HIS CASE, BUT HE WOULD BE THE SAME MAN IN ANY PROFESSION; EVEN JOURNALISM. OR IS A HANG TOWARDS PERFECTION NOT FOR A JOURNALIST?
J. P. WARD.
Where does devolving power move via deniable accountability to totally abrogating responsibility? Well usually when it's going wrong because if it was all OK you can be sure the politico's would want the credit.
Leaving aside whether it's appropriate to throw 12% of GNP "over the wall" to some Quango whos terms of reference and accountability seem vague at best shouldn't there be a more careful analysis of whether say the German or French models might be better than the current NHS approach before we do anything? Too many people are focussed on the detail with no-one fundamentally proposing how better a "free at the point of delivery" service might be run.
Whilst this latest NHS proposal may not strictly be privatisation it seems to me that it rather more closely parallels the Railtrack situation than it does the Bank of England. Perhaps it's a hybrid between Railtrack and the Home Office. Neither fit for purpose, both short of capacity, many delays,no clarity of priorities or what success looks like and inevitably no idea of how to get there. And in the end both of them reliant on the private sector (the train operators or PFI) for further investment and much of the operation of service delivery.
Now what does this tell us about Gordon? I sense a master of the detail re the status quo ( although the numerous IT fiascos at The Treasury, the administrative nightmare of the tax credits systems and the associated frauds plus the plethora of VAT scams gives one doubts about that too) but no real vision of the future and thus no clue how to get there.
Perhaps the Treasury issues are indicative of GB too. HE may grasp the detail but have no real appreciation of the complexities of trying to impliment and administer them in the real world, let alone explaing them to the taxpayer.
Can you imagine what a fiasco he is going to be at PMQ's? Not only will we not get a picture of the wood, we wont see the trees either because he is going to be banging on about the detailed ecology in the leaf litter underneath. Gordon shows all the empathy and communication skills of a computer, good at what it does, but with no ability to design its own reliable programs.
All the talk is about Brown replacing Blair, however, who will replace Brown as Chancellor if, and when he becomes PM?
Would Brown as PM be able to disengage himself from 10 years as Chancellor and allow his replacement to function without interference? Or will Brown appoint a YES man to do his bidding?
The trouble for Gordon Brown is that him and Tony Blair come as a package and his credibility will forever be tainted by his closeness to Blair, even though they cannot apparently stand each other.
Gordon Brown has also never held any other government job but the Chancellorship, and he's ridden his luck with that, so surely he has no real idea how the other departments are functioning operationally. If his bid for the Leadership was akin to a job interview in the real world, he would be rejected for lack of experience.
I also find it sureal that Brown is now regarded as a political heavyweight when you think back to the wierdo he seemed when in opposition!
Will he also rule out ever joining the single currency to wrongfoot the eurorealists?
I can't understand why Brown thinks he has any business devolving power to the English NHS or local government.
He should bugger off back to Scotland and leave us to sort out the mess that he helped create.
Blair has not gone yet?will he ever?people really should listen to what Blair said "if conditions allow" he would go.Might one suggest a US/Iran war might/will keep Blair as PM?.I would put NOTHING past Blair and tonight we may have seen the first rumblings to keep Blair as John Reid said he was "stupid to have said he would go in the first place".
So what does Gordon Brown think
"Unacceptably expensive,economically wasteful and militarily unsound"
Gordon Brown on Trident,1984
Doesn`t think that now does he.