Uh-oh, Gordon Brown wants to talk about my bed linen. “If you stay in a hotel, the laundry is usually not owned by the hotel. It’s rented from a laundry company.” The pillowcases and sheets, he has discovered, are thrown away with minor damage after perhaps 80 uses — even though “they’re almost invariably completely usable”.
You may recall Brown was probably the most morally minded and micro-managerial of Britain’s modern prime ministers. He wouldn’t let good linen go to waste. Aged 73, he is creating a network of “multibanks”: food banks for non-food items. While some of Britain’s former leaders are writing silly books for silly cheques, Brown exudes earnestness.
The multibanks hand out old pillowcases and sheets. They receive truckloads of unwanted Amazon products: returns, surplus, or stock from bust suppliers. Previously wasted or destroyed, these are resold or redistributed. “Every family in Kirkcaldy got a colander! Very expensive ones!” Brown is also negotiating supplies of much-needed hygiene products. “We’ve got 10mn toilet rolls,” says the growl that read out 11 Budgets. Is he any good at this? “I won’t tell you the price, but you’d be impressed.”
How ironic that the British politician possibly doing most to create David Cameron’s “Big Society” is the man who lost the 2010 election to him. Brown is a throwback to the idea that public service is a privilege you earn, not a right you enjoy. He lives in his old constituency north of Edinburgh. We drive along a road built on land his grandfather once farmed; we see the town where his father preached; we talk of the local football club, second in the Scottish Championship (“They should have been first”). You can take the man out of Fife, but not forever.
Brown may provide a model for former prime ministers. He is already a model for the next chancellor. Before their 1997 landslide victory, he and Tony Blair won over Tory voters by promising not to increase the top and bottom rates of income tax. Their successors Rachel Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer are repeating the trick, ruling out rises in income tax .
The forces pulling Britain apart are greater than the forces holding it together, unless something is done about it
Brown’s playbook had another side: he had a plan for Bank of England independence, which he kept secret until he became chancellor. Should we expect Labour to have something up their sleeve now? “I’m sure they do.” But politics “is a different situation from the 1990s. The Conservative party has moved far further to the right.” Brown talks regularly to Reeves, although he insists he doesn’t want to interfere: “My advice is not to take my advice.”
He has proposed constitutional changes, including making the House of Lords fully elected and giving councils more power. Is this how Westminster restores public trust? “Government’s got to deliver,” Brown says. “You’re here in Fife. Seen from London, the world looks a bit different . . . I don’t think people realise just how much Westminster and Whitehall are regarded as almost alien by lots of people.”
So much has been written about Brown that you know what traits to expect. You don’t expect to see them all in one afternoon. I spent five hours with Brown: in his house, in his protection team’s Range Rover, in two multibank warehouses, and in a seaside restaurant where he ate fish and chips and failed to open a ketchup sachet with his teeth. He looks the same: chiselled head, gnawed fingertips, occasional grand smiles.
Aside from the swearing, I saw it all: the charm, the frustration, the competitiveness, the awkwardness, the stories. (A key part of fame is having the confidence to retell your best jokes.) Brown gives interviews in the same way an emperor penguin crosses Antarctica: sometimes gliding effortlessly, sometimes barely tolerating the headwinds. His joys and anxieties run through his entire frame. Whether you like Brown or loathe him, you would enjoy playing poker against him.
People say he’s more relaxed now. Such things are relative. He wears no tie with his suit. (Is it true that he once went jogging in a suit? “I don’t think so. I don’t actually like jogging: jogging sounds very slow to me.”) He still finds it hard to talk about himself. He still believes journalists are trying to entrap him. “I don’t want to talk about the past,” he stutters, when I make political small-talk. “You’re dragging me back all the time. You want me to criticise the Liberals!” I assure him I am not looking for a headline about the Liberal Democrats.
Brown is worried about “austerity’s children”. He doesn’t “want to be party political”, but he can’t resist listing the benefits young people have lost since New Labour: Sure Start, educational maintenance allowances, child trust funds . . .
A consensus is coalescing in British politics that austerity was a mistake. But was there an alternative? “Yes! I can show you the letter I wrote to Nick Clegg, telling him exactly what would happen if he joined the Conservative government. One, we were going to have austerity and the economy was going to not grow. Two, our European membership would be at risk.”
But if it won the 2010 election, Labour had planned to cut public spending, by £47bn rather than the Tories’ £57bn. “We wanted to do roughly what America was doing, which was to grow the economy, and on the basis of growth, you raise your tax revenues.” Is it only with hindsight that we realise that we should have used low interest rates to invest? “A lot of people were saying it at the time.” Maybe, but they failed to make the case.
In 2014, Brown helped to defeat Scottish independence. Is he confident now? “It’s a challenge.” The Scottish National party has “messed it up”, and now poll below 40 per cent, but “support for independence has remained exactly the same”, near 50 per cent. “You’ve got to put a positive argument. You can’t just say the SNP have failed, therefore independence is off the agenda . . . In the long run, the forces pulling Britain apart are greater than the forces holding it together, unless something is done about it.”
Brown’s constitutional plan would “make Manchester, Newcastle, Birmingham, Cardiff [and] Bristol centres of initiative”. Is Labour adopting it? “We’ll see.” He opposes proportional representation, because it “give[s] support to extremists”.
Brown hasn’t drunk a cup of coffee since the financial crisis: “The temptation was just too great.” Today he is drinking sparkling water. Will the multibanks be part of his legacy? He writhes with discomfort. “It’s not about anything to do with that.”
Brown, son of a church minister, recently gave a memorial lecture in honour of his late friend, the UK’s former chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks. It was a defence of faith in public life. “I don’t think you should underestimate the motivational power that religion and ethics provides,” he tells me.
He cites a survey showing the richest Britons now give less despite earning more. “The top 1 per cent earn on average £270,000 a year, and on average they give [less than] £600 to charity. And that’s with Gift Aid! I was brought up in the town of Adam Smith, and next to the town of Andrew Carnegie. Where are the modern British philanthropists?”
For the Fife multibank, he cajoled acquaintances to chip in (“‘Suggested’ is not the right word,” laughs one). Football provides a slightly artificial glue (“He’s a Dunfermline supporter!” Brown jabs at one man). Two more multibanks have opened elsewhere in the UK. Since August 2022, they have given away 2mn items, worth £20mn. “Next year, we could get up 20mn, which could be £200mn.” Practice is tougher than theory. There is a limit to demand for hotel bedsheets.
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Brown also fumes that companies have to pay VAT on the notional value of any goods they donate; it’s cheaper for them to send them to landfill. “It’s ridiculous and it’s going to be changed, I hope, but the government’s taking ages to do it.” Once a tax-tinkerer, always a tax-tinkerer.
Tories point out that absolute poverty has fallen slightly since 2010. Brown says the measure, based on 2010 incomes adjusted for inflation, “doesn’t tell you who’s in poverty. Food prices have gone up far faster than ordinary inflation.”
I suggest that, if austerity had never happened, Brown — the hyperactive heir to his father’s ministry — would still be doing this. “I don’t know!” he laughs. “You can’t rewrite history . . . I’ve been in every continent for the UN. I never thought I’d have to do something about poverty at home as well . . . I really didn’t think we could go as far backwards as we’ve gone.”
His own home exudes frugality. A dozen copies of his autobiographies are piled in the hall. In his study, the TV is blocked by another pile of books. Brown has forsworn private healthcare, and declined to sit for an official parliamentary portrait. He doesn’t want a knighthood. “It’s not for me.” Surely he must have some luxuries? “It’s not really where I’m at.”
Brown swings between seeming terrified of nationalism and insisting things can improve. “Britain’s got major problems, partly because of Brexit and everything else. But we’ve never fallen, except for very brief periods, for self-interested individualism. We could build a cohesive and fair society if we had the right conditions.”
We leave the second multibank warehouse and get back in the Range Rover. The back of a car was, in 2010, the scene of Brown’s worst gaffe, when he called a voter “bigoted”. This time the mask slips in a different way. He is beaming, energised. “These guys are giving up their time freely. You’ve got to restore your faith in human nature.”
This article was amended to clarify that Amazon does not send goods to landfill in the UK