Gordon Brown: the honest scorecard

Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
June 27, 2007 – May 11, 2010 · Three years · Labour

Gordon Brown waited a decade for the job he believed was rightfully his, and when he finally had it, the global financial system collapsed within his first year. His response to that crisis was, by the judgement of most economists and world leaders at the time, genuinely significant, the G20 fiscal stimulus package that Brown coordinated in April 2009 is widely credited with preventing the Great Recession from becoming a second Great Depression.

Everything else was harder. The political management was poor. The communication was poor. The decade-long rivalry with Blair had created a governing culture of paranoia and briefing that proved difficult to shed when he moved next door. He was, in the assessment of most commentators, better at rescuing the global economy than at running a political party.

1. Economic Stewardship, Mixed

Brown's most significant economic action as Prime Minister was the October 2008 bank recapitalisation, a £500 billion package that stabilised the British banking system and was subsequently adopted as a template by governments across the world. The decision to part-nationalise RBS and Lloyds, made over a weekend, prevented a banking collapse that would have been catastrophic for ordinary depositors and the broader economy. This was bold, correct, and rapidly executed.

Against this must be set his record as Chancellor, which directly precedes his premiership: the decade of borrowing during the boom years, the decision to sell 395 tonnes of gold reserves at near-historic lows between 1999 and 2002, and the regulatory framework that allowed the banking excess to accumulate. Brown as PM responded brilliantly to a crisis that Brown as Chancellor had partly enabled. The record is genuinely Mixed.

2. Foreign Policy & Alliances, Mixed

Brown's foreign policy was dominated by managing the inheritance of Iraq and Afghanistan. He oversaw the gradual British withdrawal from Iraq and the surge in Afghanistan, neither of which produced the outcomes that had been promised when the conflicts began. His personal relationship with President Obama was warmer than Blair's sometimes difficult final relationship with Bush.

The G20 London Summit of April 2009, which Brown chaired and whose $1.1 trillion stimulus package he largely orchestrated, was a genuine piece of international economic leadership that stabilised the global response to the financial crisis. This deserves recognition as foreign policy achievement even if it does not fit the conventional template.

3. National Security & Use of Force, Mixed

Brown oversaw the continued British military presence in Afghanistan, where casualties were rising without commensurate strategic progress. The Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War was established under his government, a decision that required accepting the political risk of public scrutiny of his own party's most contested decision. The eventual report was published in 2016, after Brown had left office.

The domestic counter-terrorism approach, which had expanded significantly under Blair following 7/7, continued under Brown, including the controversial proposals for 42-day pre-charge detention that were defeated in the Lords. The national security record reflects the difficult inheritance of the Iraq and Afghanistan commitments without significant independent initiative.

4. Institutional Conduct, Mixed

Brown came to office promising 'a new politics', a break from the Blairite media management and spin culture. The promise was not kept: the briefing culture, though somewhat reduced, continued; the relationship between Downing Street and the press remained adversarial and manipulative. The decision not to call an autumn 2007 election, widely anticipated, then abruptly abandoned when polls tightened, was politically damaging and reflected poor judgment rather than constitutional impropriety.

His constitutional reform proposals, including a written constitution, a bill of rights, and further Lords reform, were never enacted. The gap between the 'new politics' rhetoric and the actual political management of his government was wide enough to be noticed and wide enough to matter.

5. Social Contract, Mixed

Brown's fiscal stimulus, the temporary VAT cut, the bank bailout, the maintained public spending, prevented a much sharper recession from producing the unemployment spikes that previous downturns had created. The Child Poverty Act 2010, which legally committed the government to eliminating child poverty by 2020, was an important piece of social legislation (though the target was subsequently abandoned by the Coalition government).

The 10p tax rate abolition, removing the lowest rate of income tax, which disproportionately affected low earners, was a serious error that Brown had introduced as Chancellor and was forced to partially reverse as Prime Minister. The pre-election budget's fiscal projections, which understated the deficit's scale, complicated the incoming government's options. The social record is Mixed: good instincts, some serious own-goals.

6. Crisis Leadership, Strong

The October 2008 bank recapitalisation was crisis leadership of the highest order. Faced with the imminent collapse of major British banks, Brown and his Chancellor Alistair Darling made decisions over a single weekend that prevented a cascade failure. The subsequent G20 coordination, getting the major economies to agree a coordinated fiscal stimulus rather than retreating into national protectionism, required months of personal diplomacy that Brown prosecuted with unusual drive and skill.

Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly said that Brown 'saved the world' at the London Summit. Brown repeated this in Parliament and was immediately mocked. He had, in fact, made a substantial contribution to preventing a much worse outcome. The crisis leadership rating on the financial crisis is Strong.

7. Environmental & Generational Responsibility, Strong

The Climate Change Act 2008, passed with near-unanimous cross-party support, was the world's first legally binding national framework for reducing carbon emissions, committing the UK to an 80% reduction by 2050. It created the Committee on Climate Change as an independent statutory body and established the carbon budgeting mechanism that subsequent governments have operated under. This is a landmark piece of environmental legislation whose significance has grown as the climate emergency has intensified.

The Act was the defining environmental achievement of his government and, arguably, the most important piece of British domestic legislation of the decade. Its passage represents a genuine generational commitment that Brown can legitimately claim as his most lasting legacy.

8. Character & Democratic Conduct, Mixed

Brown's personal integrity was not in serious question: he was not corrupt, not personally dishonest, and not self-serving in the ordinary political sense. The allegations of bullying behaviour toward staff, substantiated in some accounts, reflect a personality under sustained pressure rather than systemic abuse of power. His decision not to call an autumn 2007 election, and the manner of the retreat, was the political character question of his premiership: he blinked, and everyone saw it.

He accepted defeat in 2010 without contesting the result, actively assisted the coalition negotiations, and left Downing Street having behaved within democratic norms throughout. His post-political career has been marked by genuine international engagement on poverty and public health. The character record is Mixed: personal integrity present, political courage intermittent.

Overall

Brown's premiership is defined by one extraordinary crisis managed brilliantly and everything else managed adequately at best. The Climate Change Act and the bank recapitalisation are genuine, lasting achievements. The political management, the communication, and the inability to translate competence into public confidence are genuine, lasting failures.

He was better at governing than at politics, and in a democracy that distinction matters. The counterfactual, what the 2008 financial crisis looks like without Brown's intervention, suggests his legacy should be more positive than the 2010 election result implies.

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Related questions

Brown is a genuinely tragic figure in British political history: a man who spent ten years preparing to be prime minister and then discovered that the preparation was for a different job than the one he faced. The global financial crisis that arrived within his first year as prime minister was both his defining challenge and, in historical terms, his primary legacy.

The response to the 2008 financial crisis will occupy historians for decades. Brown's decision to recapitalise the banking system by taking equity stakes in failing banks - the weekend of October 12, 2008 - was a genuine act of economic statesmanship that other governments subsequently followed. The G20 coordination that he led in the immediate aftermath of the crisis represented genuine leadership of the international economic response.

The pre-crisis decade at the Treasury is more complicated. The abolition of the dividend tax credit in 1997, the decision to sell half of Britain's gold reserves at historically low prices between 1999 and 2002, the sale of the 3G spectrum at prices that subsequently looked excessive: individual decisions that seemed defensible at the time look different in retrospect. The fiscal loosening from 2001 onwards - the end of the golden rule's effective application - left less fiscal room than Brown's public statements suggested.

The brief Brownite honeymoon of 2007 - the floods managed competently, the foot and mouth contained, the polls giving Labour a substantial lead - created the temptation of an early election. The decision not to call it, in circumstances that suggested fear rather than principle, was the moment his political authority began to drain away permanently.

The Historian

Historian · early 50s

The Economist

Economist · mid-40s

Brown's economic record divides neatly between the Treasury years and the Downing Street years, and the assessments are very different. As Chancellor, he presided over the longest period of uninterrupted growth in modern British economic history - growth that reflected favourable global conditions but also competent macroeconomic management, including the Bank of England independence decision of 1997.

The financial crisis response of 2008 was the most significant economic intervention by any British government since the war. The bank recapitalisation, the fiscal stimulus, the G20 coordination: these were the right moves, implemented at speed under enormous pressure. The counterfactual - what would have happened without coordinated government intervention in the banking system - is unknowable, but serious economists believe the outcome could have been significantly worse.

The pre-crisis fiscal loosening is the most serious economic charge against Brown. From around 2001, he began treating the golden rule as a political construct rather than a binding constraint, choosing the measuring period to make the rule appear to be met. By 2007, the structural deficit was larger than the headlines suggested. When the crisis arrived, the fiscal room available for stimulus was constrained by the deficits already accumulated in good years.

The gold sales of 1999-2002 - selling approximately 395 tonnes at prices averaging around 275 dollars per ounce - became a symbol of economic misjudgement when gold prices subsequently rose tenfold. The decision to pre-announce the sales drove prices down further. By any standard evaluation, it was poor treasury management, even if the underlying diversification rationale was not unreasonable.

The Politician

Politician · late 40s

Brown's political failure was as complete as his economic crisis management was impressive, and the two things are not unrelated. The same qualities that made him a formidable Chancellor - the single-minded focus, the relentless preparation, the unwillingness to compromise on what he believed was right - made him a poor political communicator and an ineffective manager of human relationships at the top of government.

The election-that-never-was in autumn 2007 is the defining moment of his political failure. Having allowed expectations of an early election to build through September and October, he then retreated when internal polling suggested the result was uncertain. The retreat was characterised by dishonesty: claiming he had decided against an election because he wanted to set out his vision when the real reason was fear of losing. His authority never fully recovered from this episode.

His internal management of government was chaotic. The briefings against colleagues - conducted through intermediaries in ways that maintained deniability - created a culture of fear and suspicion in Whitehall. The Damian McBride affair, in which a senior adviser was found to have been planning smear operations against Conservative politicians, illustrated the toxicity of the Brownite political operation at its worst.

The 2010 election result - Conservative plurality without majority - was not as bad as the polls had suggested throughout much of 2009. Brown fought a credible campaign on the economy and came closer than many expected. The bigoted woman incident, in which he was caught on an open microphone dismissing a Labour voter, was the encapsulation of everything that made Brown a difficult political figure: genuine, sometimes harsh private judgements at odds with his public persona.