[kictanet] So Who's This Gordon Brown Anyway?

[bitange at jambo.co.ke]

Dear All,
Please take a break from ICTs and read the Wall Sreet Journal article
below on Gordon Brown.




So Who's This Gordon Brown Anyway?

By Quentin Letts

877 words

28 June 2007

The Wall Street Journal

A13

English

(Copyright (c) 2007, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

London -- On Wednesday, we in Britain received a new prime minister. About
an hour after Tony Blair formally resigned his post to Queen Elizabeth II,
the Right Honourable James Gordon Brown arrived at Buckingham Palace,
kissed the Queen's hand and was invited to form a new government.

That is how we often do things here when we want to change the head of
government. There need not be a general election. Nor a coup. Just a
post-prandial trip to the palace by, in this instance, a bookish, burly
Scotsman who has ached and plotted and toiled and seethed to become Prime
Minister since he was first elected to Westminster's House of Commons in
1983. Now, at last, his hour has come.

When John Major succeeded Margaret Thatcher, so little was known about the
new PM that foreign diplomats struggled to form much of a view about his
politics. Those initial dispatches from London embassies back to capital
cities contained a fair deal of padding and bluster.

With Gordon Brown there need be no such scratching around for
intelligence. The methodical Mr. Brown, a subtle but unrelenting
redistributionist, has been Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer since
1997. His wide-ranging policies are there for anyone patient enough to
study them. He believes in stealthy (i.e., hidden) taxes, a big state and
exceedingly complex schemes to help "the puir," as he pronounces "the
poor."

But what sort of character is this Brown? As the political salonistes of
Washington, D.C. lick their pencils and hover over the B section of their
address books, what of the inner Brown? Is he convivial? Is he one of
life's thigh slappers? Or is he, well, hard work? One to stick next to
Henry Kissinger at dinner? Or one for the splashier, Harry-and-Tina-end of
the table?

Unusual for a successful modern politician, Gordon Brown is not a
particularly good actor -- bad at fake smiles, yet to perfect that look of
plastic delight which can be flashed in an instant, normally when a camera
is nearby. If he is having a bad time, big Gordon has a job disguising it.
His purple lips start to pout. He begins to pull at his dark
pepper-and-salt fringe, or at least he did until he recently had it
shampooed and trimmed. He has a maddening habit of looking at the floor.

Gordon Brown will be the first British prime minister since Clement Attlee
(who beat Churchill in 1945) not to know how to drive a motor car. In part
this is because he lost the sight of his left eye in a sporting injury at
school. In part, though, his inability to drive reflects a wider
nonchalance about fripperies, as he would consider them. Call it unworldly
if you like, but Gordon Brown is not much interested in clothes or food or
in his own wealth.

Just as Linus in Peanuts draws strength from his security blanket, so Mr.
Brown never feels entirely rooted unless he is surrounded by mounds of
hand-scrawled briefing notes. These sheets of A4 tend to bear color-coded
sticky labels and are carried about Westminster by his acolytes. If they
ever encountered a tornado, the air above London would be thick for days
with slow-settling sheets of notation scrawled in an almost illegible
black hand.

He is a poor time keeper. Tidiness has never been a forte although the
crumpled shirts and shiny suit trousers improved after his comparatively
late marriage. His wife Sarah has battled to get him to wear neckties in
any color other than red. He has relented to the extent of sometimes
wearing a blue tie. He and Sarah lost their first child and bore their
bereavement with great stoicism. Their third, born last year, has cystic
fibrosis.

Gordon Brown is very different from the socially fluent Tony Blair. In
private he can be charming -- and in private a wide smile comes easily --
but in public he is a bundle of anxiety who thinks he must crush all
resistance. His jaw juts when he speaks and he has a smallish repertoire
of jokes. At a lectern he does not swagger or casually survey the throng.
He pats his script repeatedly with two hands the fingernails of which are
bitten to bleeding remnants. Not even the most skilled Manhattan
manicurist could salvage those nails.

This does not, I hope, make Gordon Brown sound dull or timid. He is a more
intellectual man than the sometimes broad-brush Blair. A sometime
journalist, he is alive to gossip. He can also be astoundingly determined.

A clergyman's son, he can drop spiritual language into political remarks
without sounding arch. He is enigmatic, secretive, cautious, brooding, and
before marriage he was considered a great catch for glamorous women. Prime
Minister Brown may not prove quite as unquestioning an ally of the current
White House. He is, however, an intriguing customer, as America may soon
discover now that the Queen's hands have been brushed by those pouty,
purple lips.



---------------------------------------------- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by Jambo MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.
---------------------------------------------
"easy access to the world"