Gordon Brown Reflects on Climate, Politics, and Legacy in Fife Interview

It’s a Monday in August and as England burns in dystopian heat, Gordon Brown and I are in his office at the top of his house in North Queensferry, overlooking the moody waters of the Firth of Forth. It’s hard to recall the top of my own sauna-like house in London as we stand here in the cool, wearing wool suits and necessary socks, my coat slung over the back of a chair. “I was watching Raith Rovers – the local football team – on Saturday,” Brown says, “and it was really cold. There was a wind blowing in from the sea.” He asks if I’ve heard the famous joke – “Scotland’s only got two seasons: July and winter”– then chuckles. It’s one of his favourites. (I’ll hear him tell it three times today.)

That’s not to say Fife has been untouched by the multiple heatwaves. They had a few sunny days. One hit 24C – “a shock”, Brown says, July temperatures typically being 15-17C. He stood in his kitchen and considered the modest patch of grass at the back of the house. “I never imagined being out in the garden in the summer. I never imagined it because it’s either raining or too cold.” Once out, he found himself battling a “very dangerous” nest of wasps. One family member was stung, then there was the rigmarole of specialists in thick gloves and protective suits undertaking its removal. By the time that was done, the sun had gone in.

Climate is something we will discuss today, it being something of a wasps’ nest. Also: Donald Trump, Europe, Andy Burnham and the Labour party. The former prime minister (2007-2010) and longest-serving chancellor of the exchequer in modern history (1997-2007) will touch on Iraq, the financial crisis and Scottish independence. He will give his diagnosis of the current state of global politics, the focus of his new book, The Future Starts With Us.

What’s telling is how much people still want to hear his views – arguably far more than any of the six broken PMs since (tickets for his forthcoming book events in Bath and Edinburgh sold out in minutes). Many feel we didn’t know how lucky we were with Brown and his old-school sense of duty. At the time we saw him as a brooding toad, a hangdog, grizzled pessimist, instead of prizing his gratitude and prudence. His father’s booming refrain was “Be thankful for what you have; you can cope with a lot less!” so perhaps it wasn’t surprising Brown did not cash in when he left No 10. Did not take a fat job in banking, a knighthood, or even the prime ministerial pension to which he’s entitled.

He’s aware that, as a political heavyweight, his views on Labour still count and that he has a reputation for micromanagement, so initially he’s careful when I ask about Burnham. “I don’t want to be a backseat driver,” he says, settling into a tub chair next to a wall of books (political biographies, political philosophy, a first edition Keynes). But can he help himself? No, he cannot. A second later he’s saying he “hopes” Burnham will heed a report he did for Keir Starmer recommending abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with an elected chamber “representative of all the regions and nations of the country, which fits in with Andy’s idea that the regions and the nations are going to have a bigger voice”.

He reminds me the Lords is an unelected chamber of about 800, “the second largest legislature in the world after China”. It’s packed to the Pugin rafters with lobbyists. The problem will be persuading them to vote to cut their own throats. “But something’s got to change.”

Brown calls Burnham “Andy”. He has known him a long time. Burnham’s first cabinet job was under Brown as chief secretary to the Treasury (later, he was health secretary in Brown’s government). Brown’s official role under Burnham is as an adviser overseeing the G20, which Britain hosts next year. He was brought in to do it by Starmer (remember the photo op of him going in to No 10 with Harriet Harman?), along with an overhaul of defence spending. Brown doesn’t deny that Burnham sought his advice before appointing Brown’s friend and former parliamentary private secretary John Healey as chancellor, but says, “My advice would’ve been not to take my advice.” (It’s the same line he used when journalists asked if he’d been advising Rachel Reeves.)

Not that he doesn’t have plenty of advice to give: “Look, the British economy was growing about 2.5% a year when I was chancellor, and now it’s growing about 1% a year. So I do believe, as I said to Andy, that the focus on Britain as an innovation nation is an important part of the solution to this growth deficit.”

Someone brings me a tea and Brown a glass of still water. He hasn’t had caffeine since he overdid it during the financial crisis in 2008, and recently gave up sparkling for “reasons of health”. (No joke, his rider for book events is tap water. An adviser adds, “And maybe a banana.”)

Since leaving office, Brown has popped his head above the parapet on specific issues: Brexit, antisemitism, universal credit. He is gravely concerned about the far right, more popular in Europe now than before fascists seized power in the 1930s. The number of truly liberal democracies has dropped to its lowest level in three decades – 29, he writes in his book. “Some fear we are approaching a moment comparable to the run-up to the second world war.”

Part of the issue is that the postwar rules-based order no longer exists. We have moved from a “unipolar” to a “multipolar” world in which leaders promote a sort of zero fucks nationalism – America First, Italy First, Russia First. “Putin feels he can ignore the rule of law with impunity,” Brown says. “Netanyahu feels the same. In my book, I’ve got quotes from each explicitly saying it’s all about power now. If you’ve got the power, you use it. It doesn’t matter what the morality of what you’re doing is. I’ve got Trump saying, ‘I decide what my morality is. I don’t take moral lectures from anybody.’”

This posturing is behind Putin and Netanyahu’s indiscriminate bloody slaughters in Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon, behind America’s devastating attacks on Iran (“hospitals and schools should never be subject to bombing in any war”). But also, Brown says, “America was not able to stop the invasion of Ukraine, even though they knew about it in advance. And the Americans are not telling the Israelis actually to respect the idea that Palestine should have sovereignty. When I was prime minister and Israel invaded Gaza in 2009, the Americans told them to get out and they left.”

Brown met Netanyahu a few times when the Israeli leader was finance minister and he was chancellor. “He’s changed dramatically,” Brown says, then corrects himself, because “he’s always been obsessed with Iran. For 20 years it’s been the country that he wanted to neutralise or destabilise. So I’m not surprised that he persuaded Trump to [bomb].”

But were seeds of these violations not sown with the Iraq war, which he supported with Tony Blair in 2003? “To some extent, the interventions in the years from 2000. You can go back to the Vietnam war, to be honest.”

He has long admitted he made a “mistake” with Iraq. He felt “misled” when he learned, through a document he saw after he left government, that the US knew Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction in 2002. Had he known, would he have resigned? “Yes. I would not have been able to support the government.”

Blair now sits on Trump’s Board of Peace. While it’s promoted as an alternative peacekeeping agency, Brown sees it as essentially a corporate exercise. Its founding document, Brown argues, is closer “to an international property developer under the guise of making peace”. I begin a question and he interrupts: “I know what you’re going to ask.” What? “About Tony Blair. I don’t want to talk about Tony Blair.”

In his book, Brown writes that the US “may” have a new president in 2028. Why “may” and not “will”, given the two-term limit? Does he believe there won’t be an election? “No, Trump’s never been against elections. He’s just against results he doesn’t like.” What might this mean for the UK-US relationship? “The thing about that is, no matter what you think of any individual, you’ve got to try and make it work. Keir Starmer, to his credit, tried. Andy Burnham will try. Nobody’s saying they are going to be soulmates. You want to make it work without the abandonment of any principle.”

Brown’s suggestion for dealing with the spiralling global chaos is to get back to a rules-based world ASAP, with an “updated” commitment to “the rule of law, democratic accountability, respect for human rights, freedom of assembly, international cooperation, humanitarian aid, environmental stewardship. People are angry,” he continues. “Rightly so, because things they took for granted have somehow been undermined.”

But he skates over the role played by social media in the darkening of the political discourse, except to say it’s a “shouting match without an umpire”. Tech bros are the pied pipers of our children’s attention, I say. He points to a local Facebook group, Love Kirkcaldy! which, to him, exemplifies the positive way people come together online. He stresses – and this is a big theme of his book – one answer to tackling issues in national politics and international geopolitics lies at home. We need to refocus on our local communities: “Stronger communities will give us a stronger resistance to extremism.”

The book is dedicated to the people of Kirkcaldy, where Brown is an active force. We visit the Cottage Family Centre, a charity of which he is patron that helps under-16s and their families. During Covid I visited one of the charity’s two sites. A volunteer said that, on hearing about two children who were sleeping on the floor, Brown had gone home and dismantled his sons’ bunkbed, returning to present it to her along with sheets. (She also said he attempted to make the beds, but bodged this so comprehensively that his protection team had to take over.)

Then there’s the local multibank charity he set up: warehouses that take donations of goods from 90 companies, including Amazon, then redistribute them to the poor. I ask if he feels conflicted, given Amazon is a notoriously appalling employer with no unions. It’s the only time he’s a little gruff with me. “My first priority is to see if we can alleviate poverty. If Amazon is prepared to help, we will work with Amazon. If other companies are prepared to help, we will work with them. Poverty has been really severe here.” He says they’ve probably turned over £250m worth of goods to people who really need them. “So for a small charity just starting off … ”

There’s also his work as a UN special envoy for global education. He tells me about going to see Gianni Infantino, the controversial president of Fifa, four years ago at the organisation’s HQ in Zurich with proposals of how to raise a billion dollars for global education through donations. “And you know the boardroom table is gold. There is a lot of conspicuous consumption on display.

“My only worry is we are not talking enough about my book,” Brown says when we are back in his protection team’s Range Rover. We are talking about the book, I stress. In fact, trying to get the interview back on track when Brown talks about the book is like wrestling a ball off Lionel Messi when he has the goal in sight.

Brown builds the book’s central argument on the idea of empathy (and there’s a certain irony in that Blair famously accused Brown of lacking emotional intelligence). “Empathy is a term that comes from Adam Smith, from The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” he says. “Smith called it sympathy, but now you’d call it empathy, which is to put yourself in other people’s shoes.” Smith recognises that loyalties to family are strongest, but “unlike JD Vance in his spat with the Pope, Smith would have said, ‘It is possible to have loyalties and feel sympathy towards people in difficult situations in any part of the world.’”

He points out of the window towards the church where his father, the Rev John Brown, was minister. There are more churches in Kirkcaldy than you can shake a stick at. “There was a disruption,” Brown says, “so churches broke away from each other. My father was one of the dissenters.” Gordon and his two brothers, John and Andrew, grew up in the draughty old manse. There was no central heating until they were teenagers. “It was quite cold.” How cold? “You got used to it.”

His mother, Jessie, had a huge influence on him, too, he says. “She always asked whether I really wanted to do the things I was doing. She made you question what you were doing.” The porridge-every-morning Calvinist upbringing was “quite strict”. He pauses. “She was quite appalled one day. She said, ‘I’ve heard a terrible story about you. I’ve heard you sometimes swear.’” (The only exclamation I hear him use is a forceful “gee whizz”.)

When the Beatles came to Kirkcaldy, the Brown boys “didn’t get to go”. Because the Fab Four encouraged loose morals? “We were told we were too young. People in my class were going, but I wasn’t.” He laughs deeply. “Luckily, I have met Paul McCartney since.” He tells me the Beatles had links with the town because John Lennon had “an aunt or someone” who lived here.

Kirkcaldy was where Brown’s prodigious intelligence was first recognised. He excelled in everything. Academically, he was fast-tracked to the University of Edinburgh at the age of 16. He was the Kirkcaldy boys’ tennis champion, a sprinter, an excellent rugby flanker. It was while playing rugby that he sustained a detached retina, an injury so serious he spent three months lying in a hospital bed, eyes bandaged, unable to move. He lost the sight in his left eye, and nearly in his right eye, too. The disability stopped him doing the thing he really wanted to do – sport – and he was forced to rethink his ambitions. “I think that’s what made me want to do something more active in the community.”

On the back seat of the car are the copious notes Brown makes while people talk to him, large letters in black felt tip, stuffed in a transparent folder. Biographers say he was an introverted child. Still now, there’s a voice in his head before he stands to give a speech, saying, “Am I really wanting to do this?” But another says, “Yes, you really have to.” “I don’t get up in the morning wanting to be on the radio or television or in front of a crowd. You do things out of obligation.”

When he was young, hierarchy expected deference, he says. The students of his generation protested, pushing “for greater individual freedom”. Photos of Brown show a serious student with long hair in a severe side-parting (unlike his beer-drinking contemporaries, he is wearing a tie). He admits he may have been more leftwing then than in his New Labour days. “But what happened in a way was that the balance between individual freedom and social obligation, between self-expression and your sense of being part of a community, got out of sync. So we threw out the baby w