Gordon brown

At a Christmas party I witnessed a showdown between two Labour movers and shakers, one a devoted Starmerite, the other an unrepentant Blairite, over whether the Prime Minister can turn things around. They didn’t agree on much – Keir Starmer’s vision or lack of it, Europe, immigration, you name it. When I commented to another leading figure in the party that Blairites, with the exception of Jonathan Powell (now running foreign policy) and Alastair Campbell (whose podcast has moved him leftwards), seem to have lost faith in this government, this former minister said: ‘Of course they have, because this is the second term of Gordon Brown.’ Among Brownites, it is

Of all Gordon Brown’s mistakes, perhaps the most sobering was his decision to end the tradition of drinking at the despatch box on Budget day. Commons convention holds that alcohol in the chamber is forbidden – with the sole exception of the chancellor when making his or her big speech. Rachel Reeves is known to like an Aperol spritz, though sadly not enough for her to restore this great custom. But we wanted to do our bit, so in protest at this abstemiousness we set ourselves a challenge: try every chancellor’s drink for which records are available, all in one sitting.  The tradition of the ‘Budget tipple’ seems to have

Last week, there was a surprise visitor to the Treasury: Gordon Brown. The former prime minister and chancellor secretly returned to his old digs for the first time since he left office 14 years ago. According to onlookers, Brown visited his old office as he caught up with the new chancellor – and his friend – Rachel Reeves. To Brownites, news of this meeting has been received with glee. Is their main man back in the fold? The conversation between Brown and Reeves is part of a pattern for this government: New Labour old-timers returning to share their wisdom with first-time ministers. In the Department of Health, Wes Streeting has

Outriders are all the rage these days in British politics. Liz Truss has Kwasi Kwarteng and Lord Frost: Rishi Sunak has Dominic Raab and Mark Harper. They act to deliver the messages their candidate can’t, launching attacks, fighting fires and speaking home truths. So it’s no surprise then that Gordon Brown, the Giffnock grouch, is now unofficially performing that role for Sir Keir Starmer, his beleaguered successor as Labour leader. Brown is close to team Starmer, and performs the role that John Major did for David Cameron in the coalition years, acting as a trial balloon to test how ideas will land. The cost-of-living crisis has been a tricky challenge

Labour has been trying to make political capital out of Russian-linked donations to the Tory party. Sir Keir Starmer might play the cross-party card in the House but not all on his benches share that sense of magnanimity. Liam Byrne enjoyed taking a pop at Boris Johnson’s socialising with oligarchs yesterday while Rachel Reeves and David Lammy previously called for the Conservatives to return nearly two million pounds of donations made since Johnson took office in 2019. Labour’s basis for this demand is that the donors ‘made money from Russia or have alleged links to the Putin regime’: quite the conflation between actual Kremlin cronies and those who have simply

As he blasts his way through the remaining support beams of the UK constitution, Gordon Brown is doing more to deliver Scottish independence than the SNP. The former Prime Minister is reportedly poised to recommend that Labour adopt ‘devo max’ as a policy, which would see the SNP-run Scottish parliament handed yet another tranche of powers. Only defence and foreign policy would remain in the hands of Westminster: everything else would be at the whim of Nicola Sturgeon. The theory is that by increasing the powers of Holyrood, the Scots’ appetite for independence will be sated. But is no evidence for this, and 23 years of evidence against it. From