June 24, 2007
Gordon Brown, Britain's New leader,
is Finally Smiling by Anna Tomforde
London
After 13 years of waiting for the top job, Gordon Brown, who will be
Britain's new prime minister, is finally smiling.
During his 10 years in government, as Chancellor of the Exchequer,
Brown remained something of an enigma to Britons, a politician
respected for his professional skills but with little popular
appeal.
But the image of "grumpy Gordon" has undergone a transformation in
recent weeks, ever since Tony Blair, his old political soulmate and
occasional rival, honoured his 1994 promise to step aside and hand
him the key to Number 10, Downing Street.
The requirement to "Smile, Daddy" - the latest catchphrase of
Brown's three-year-old son - does not need much extra prompting
these days, friends have said.
But Brown, the introvert son of a Church of Scotland minister, will
always be a serious man and politician - at his own choice.
He has promised a "humble" approach, dismissing what he calls
"celebrity politics" and pledging to "listen and learn."
When talking about himself, uneasily, Brown invariably harks back to
his strict but caring upbringing in the small town of Kirkcaldy,
near Glasgow, in the 1950s.
"You see life as the son of a church minister, you see the bereaved,
the poor and the needy come through your father's door," Brown said
in a television interview.
The Protestant ethic instilled by his father's sermons, and the help
and advice dispensed to the poor and needy in the home of the
Reverend John Brown, and his wife Elizabeth, has been his moral
compass in life, Brown has said.
One of his favourite phrases is that the "West has a duty" to help
the world's poor.
During a meeting with Pope Benedict in Rome earlier this year, Brown
presented the pontiff a selection of sermons delivered by his father
in the Presbyterian Church.
Brown, one of three brothers, was born in Glasgow Feb 20, 1951.
At the age of 12, he was canvassing for the local Labour Party,
which he joined aged 18.
An injury in a school rugby match meant that Brown, then 16, lost
the sight of his left eye, and was threatened with total blindness,
an experience that is said to have shaped him profoundly.
Brown gained a first class degree in history from Edinburgh
University by the time he was 20, where he went on to complete a
doctorate.
At 21, he was elected rector of the university, combining lecturing
with political activism and work in television.
He was elected to the parliament of Westminster in London for the
first time in 1983, where he came to share an office with another
newly elected Labour member of parliament, Tony Blair.
In 1994, Brown was widely tipped to become party leader, but agreed,
in a much talked about secret deal, to stand aside in favour of the
more charismatic, and popular, Blair.
Brown is notoriously hardworking, and known to take serious reading
on holidays.
In the 1997 election campaign, that led Labour to victory, he is
reported to have worked an average of 18 hours a day, six days a
week, after running on a treadmill for an hour each morning.
"It was politics, politics, politics," Brown's former girlfriend of
five years, Princess Marguerite of Romania, the eldest daughter of
ex-King Michael of Romania, said about him.
Brown remained a bachelor up to the age of 49, when he married, in
2000, Sarah Macaulay, a high-flying PR consultant he had been dating
for six years.
The couple's first child, Jennifer, was born in December, 2001, but
died 10 days after her premature birth.
Brown's initial joy, soon to be replaced by the image of a
heartbroken man, touched the nation.
The couple has since had two boys, John, born in 2003, and Fraser,
born in July 2006.
Brown has described being a father as "being the best thing in the
world" and made an attempt to shed his "earnest image" by smiling a
lot more and swapping dark suits for more casual clothes.
But Brown, remaining true to his fundamental convictions, has made
clear that he believes the public's appetite for "celebrity
politicians" is exhausted.
"I actually think that in the next few years politics will become
more about character, and people will judge politicians on whether
they can deal with the big issues," Brown said.
He names security, terrorism, globalisation and the "relations
between religion and society" as major international challenges.
"The world is changing so fast that only people who understand and
then act upon these big challenges are going to be able to answer
the questions that the public have about the pace of change around
them," says Brown.
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