Gordon Brown Biography

BORN TO RUN (For office)

James Gordon Brown was born on 20 February 1951 in Glasgow, the second of three sons born to Reverend Dr John Brown, a Church of Scotland minister and Elizabeth Brown. In the UK’s first ever televised debate between the Party leaders, Gordon, unlike Nick Clegg and David Cameron, cited his early family experiences several times. The Brown family lived in Glasgow until Gordon was three, when they moved to Kirkcaldy, a small industrial town on the northern shore of the Firth of Forth (and the area he represents in Parliament today). One of his most formative early experiences was when his Labour voting father took him to see the misery caused by flooding after the sea wall broke. A fundamental desire to eradicate poverty has informed his politics ever since.

Inspired by one of their father's sermons, Gordon and older brother John set up a tuck shop in the family's garage and started a newspaper to raise money for refugees. By the age of 12, he was pushing Labour Party leaflets through letterboxes. Academically gifted, Gordon took his O-Levels two years early, aged just 14. By 16, he had joined his older brother at Edinburgh University, becoming the youngest fresher at the university since 1945.

Then Gordon experienced one of the many pieces of bad luck that would mark his life. A rugby game left him with a detached retina. He spent several weeks lying in a darkened room and he missed the entire first term while doctors battled to save his sight. Gordon eventually lost the sight in one eye and it’s claimed he retained only about 30 per cent vision in the other.

But his disability barely slowed his Presbyterian work ethic. His second year of university saw him follow in the footsteps of his older brother to become the editor of the student magazine. And he grabbed national headlines by exposing the university's investments in pro-apartheid South Africa. Then, after graduating with a first in 1972, he launched a successful campaign to become the university's youngest ever Rector. So was it all work, work, work for the young Gordon? He did enjoy an unlikely romance with an exiled Romanian Princess who was also studying at the university. But they broke up after five years as she claimed he was only interested in one thing: “politics, politics, politics.”

POLITICS, POLITICS, POLITICS

After a spell as a television journalist and producer for Scottish Television, STV, in Glasgow, Brown won the safe Labour seat of Dunfermline East during the 1983 General Election, at the age of 32. (He served there until 2005 when he became MP for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath after the reorganisation of Scottish constituencies.)

A few weeks after entering the Commons, Brown began sharing an office with another new kid on the political block, one Tony Blair, a 30-year-old Islington barrister. It was a pairing that would eventually dominate British politics. Brown and Blair became friends over a shared vision. Both were convinced Labour had to change if it was ever going to win power in a Conservative-controlled landscape. They quickly became inseparable, bouncing ideas off one other and helping to write each other's speeches. However, in the world of politics there can be only one, and the friendship continued with an undercurrent of rivalry. Two years older than Blair, carrying more of an intellectual CV, and with deeper roots in the Labour movement, Brown was seen as the senior of the partnership. When Labour Party leader John Smith died of a heart attack in 1994, both Blair and Brown were considered for the job.

At one of the most famous meals in political history, the pair made a deal at the Granita restaurant in Islington. It is the stuff of political legend that the two men struck a deal. Blair would take over as party leader and Brown would get control of the Treasury. Under the agreed verbal terms, Blair was supposed to step down half way through his second term and Brown would take over as Britain's prime minister. In exchange for giving him a clear run at the leadership, Blair promised he would make Brown the most powerful chancellor in history, with unprecedented control over domestic policy. (Like many handshake promises, only one of them felt the deal was honoured). But it did allow them to unite against a common enemy, and together, they would end 18 years of Tory rule.

In 1997, Tony Blair swept New Labour to power with a landslide that also wiped out the Conservatives in Brown’s native Scotland. The former Conservative Cabinet had been mired in sleaze and Blair and Brown were seen as a new start. And to a certain extent they were. Neither politician has had any sex or drug scandals. Their failings were political, not personal.

The first test of the Brown/Blair relationship came over the Euro. Blair saw it as his destiny to take Britain into the single European currency but Brown, who was less enthusiastic, managed to seize control of the policy. He turned the Euro issue into an economic rather than a political decision by announcing five economic tests which had to be passed before he would recommend that the issue be put to a public referendum. His ‘alchemists’ trick steered Labour away from the damaging divisions that had effectively destroyed the Conservatives.

On the eve of Brown's first Budget in 1997, his two year relationship with PR executive Sarah Macauley was made public. At the behest of Brown's spin doctor, it was arranged for the couple to be photographed dining together at a Soho restaurant in order to compete with the Blair happy family image. The coupling helped endear Brown to the public and start interest in Brown the man, as opposed to just Brown, the politician.

Both Brown the man, and his image, have been softened by marriage (and Sarah’s personal touch would be carefully deployed when her Prime Minister husband fought the 2010 election). The couple had a low key wedding in Fife in 2000 and honeymooned in Cape Cod, Brown's favourite summer holiday destination.

On 28 December 2001, the couple became parents with the birth of Jennifer Jane. Jennifer was premature, and delivered by Caesarean section. Gordon’s unusual ear to ear smile was tragically ended just ten days later when Jennifer suffered a brain haemorrhage and died in his arms. Brown said their dead daughter had transformed his and Sarah's lives twice: “Once by entering our lives, then by leaving.’’

He later told reporters he could not listen to music for a year afterwards as he grieved. In their daughter's memory, Sarah Brown founded a charity, ‘Piggy Bank Kids’, which helps disadvantaged children. She also established the Jennifer Brown Research Fund to help research into pregnancy difficulties. The Browns went on to have two sons, John and James Fraser. The latter was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis shortly after his birth. Brown later revealed that John had had the controversial MMR jab, something Blair always refused to discuss on privacy grounds.

After the 2001 general election, relations between the Treasury and Number 10 deteriorated further. Critics argued that decisions that might ordinarily have been expected to be made by a prime minister were being made at the Treasury. When cameras were let into their corridors of power, Brown was caught barely bothering to make eye contact with Blair as the Chancellor walked on past his Prime Minister.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Brown presided over the longest ever period of growth. He also made the Bank of England independent and delivered an agreement at the Gleneagles Summit in 2005, supporting the world's poorest countries and helping to tackle climate change.

In 2003, with Blair’s reputation weakened by a public backlash against the Iraq war, Brown was poised for the top job. But with Labour slipping in the polls, Blair brought Brown back to centre stage, making his record of low inflation and high employment the centrepiece of the campaign. When Blair announced he was standing down, Brown’s rivals for the position were quietly but forcefully persuaded not to stand.

Just over a month after accepting the Queen's invitation to form a Government, the man who stood in the shadow of Blair was put to the test. Brown had to cope with plagues (a national outbreak of foot and mouth disease), floods (the country’s worst in 150 years) and terrorist attacks. His performance under pressure was effortless.

And Brown could have called an election then. He didn’t. If he had, even David Cameron implicitly admitted the Conservatives would have been defeated. Brown had never been, and would never be again, so popular. Now Cameron ruthlessly ridiculed him with supporters dressing up as brown bottles to show how the Prime Minister had ‘bottled’ it. His indecision would cast a shadow over his remaining days and allow numerous leadership conspiracies to fester.

And just when even the most pessimistic Labour lackeys thought it couldn’t possibly become any worse, the world economy collapsed. Brown had promised an end to the ‘boom and bust’ of the Conservatives. Whilst no one (save a handful of hedge funds) in the whole world correctly predicted the Credit Crunch, ironically, it was Brown’s adoption of Conservative laissez-faire policies to market regulation that allowed Britain to crash so spectacularly. In an unusual act of political humility, Brown would later apologise for this fatal policy of light touch regulation of the City and the markets. But even his Conservative critics now have to admit that the aid package he spearheaded with the G20 trillion dollar cash injection into the world economy was the correct course.

Brown's admirers have described him as intellectually awesome, physically impressive with broad shoulders, morally impeccable and seriously committed. But many call him dour and a control freak, possessed of "Stalinist ruthlessness". His enemies were handed extra ammunition with the release in February 2010 of the contentious Andrew Rawnsley book which portrayed Brown as a bully. It is certainly true that he used his less privileged background to beat up his Conservative opponent in the House of Commons. It remains to be seen whether such tactics will win the unelected Prime Minister his first mandate.

Timeline:

* 1972: Rector, Edinburgh University

* 1975: Temporary lecturer

* 1976: Politics lecturer, Glasgow College of Technology

* 1980: Television journalist, STV current affairs

* 1983: Labour MP, Dunfermline East

* 1985: Opposition front bench trade and industry spokesman

* 1987: Shadow chief secretary to the Treasury

* 1989: Shadow trade and industry spokesman

* 1992: Shadow chancellor

* 1997: Chancellor

* 2007: Prime Minister