Gordon Brown: The world we know is disappearing

Gordon Brown on a Broken World Order

We're delighted to be with Gordon Brown. Gordon Brown will be known to all of you. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was Prime Minister, but he's now, aged 75, still making very important contributions to public debate, not least with this book, which reminds me, Gordon, of the days working on speeches and articles with you, because it's very similar. It's full of big arguments, it's rammed with facts and statistics, but it also tries to have solutions to the challenges facing the world.

Well, the one thing that is different about it from the past is that we've surveyed 100,000 people in 34 countries to ask them their views about their hopes, their fears, but also their aspirations about the kind of future they want. They feel that the world order is broken. They also feel that there's a civic recession: that in their own communities, the organisations that used to speak up for them are not there in the same way as in the past.

So we've got two big events, if you like. One is the break-up of the world order, which we can see around us every day with wars and everything else. And two, we've got a civic recession. And what we've found is something quite fascinating: those people who are involved in their local communities, and particularly those people who are meeting people across ethnic and religious divides, are the people who are most likely to resist populist nationalists (and of course we see that across Europe, with Germany only in the last few days), and are most likely to favour international cooperation.

So we know there's a link between the global and the local, because global events affect people in their own communities. Energy prices, the closure of the straits, all these things affect people directly, even food prices going up. But now we can see there's a link between the local and the global. If we can get more people involved in their local communities, if they can see the wisdom of bridging with people across different divides, then public opinion will grow in favour of international cooperation, which of course is something that is sadly missing when we're facing up to climate change, all sorts of problems with AI regulation, and of course the big humanitarian issues around the world.

The Three Seismic Shifts Changing the World

Gordon, one of the striking things that comes up again and again in the book is how radically the world has changed from the world of your government. Again and again, you're describing a world which would have been very difficult to imagine in the 2000s.

Yes. There are about 65 conflicts happening around the world. It's the biggest number of conflicts since 1946, just after the Second World War ended. I describe three seismic shifts in the way the world has developed.

One is that America is no longer the hegemonic power it used to be, and we're moving to a multipolar world. So there are many centres of decision-making. That doesn't mean to say that America is not the most important and most powerful power, but it cannot have its own way in every respect. I don't think 20 years ago Putin would have dared invade Ukraine. I don't think 15 years ago Netanyahu would still be effectively in Gaza. I remember when I was Prime Minister, he was forced out by the Americans, told to leave Gaza, and agreed to do so. And I think 10 years ago Xi would not be threatening to take over Taiwan. So American leadership is under stress, and I think that's a long-term factor. It's not just dependent on Trump himself.

The second seismic shift, if I may say so, is that we're moving from a free trade world, where free trade was the key to prosperity, open trade round the world, supply chains global, to a protectionist world. Every day you hear talk of more tariffs or export bans or sanctions or something. So countries are sheltering themselves against a globalisation that they don't think has been working for them.

But the third thing is even more worrying. We're moving from a rules-based order, which you talk about a lot on your broadcasts, to a power-based order, where might is right. You've got Trump, you've got Erdoğan, you've got Modi in India, you've got Xi in China, you've got Putin in Russia. They see the world in terms of aggression. They see the world in terms of us versus them: I'm only doing well if you're doing badly. It's a zero-sum mentality and mindset, and I think that's what we've got to counteract. That's why the force of public opinion, which never really mattered as much in previous centuries, does matter now, and we've got to mobilise it. That's why I'm proposing a number of different remedies.

What Today's Political Leaders Are Getting Wrong

If you take your two things, you've got the breakdown of the global world order. You're very, very frank about Trump and the threat that he poses to lots of the things that we used to take for granted. And then you've got this civic problem as well. There's also the problem in our politics. We've had seven prime ministers since you, and it's the seventh prime minister now; something's going on with politics too. What's your advice to the seventh in terms of how he addresses these two things, the global breakdown and the civic breakdown?

Well, I realised when I was Prime Minister, when we had the global financial crisis, that there were two things that were absolutely crucial for leadership. The first is that you've got to get to the root of the problem you're dealing with. During the financial crisis, people thought it was a liquidity problem that the banks had. It was actually a solvency problem, and we had to understand that before we could deal with it. And the second thing is that you've got to be ahead of events. If you're behind events, you're always rushing to catch up. So you've got to think two steps ahead, three steps ahead. That's what we tried to do during the financial crisis.

And I think that's where we are at the moment. We've got to think two steps ahead, but we've also got to understand the root of the problem. Because look, when we did our survey of British and European opinion, what's fascinating is that you see it at two levels. The first is the surface manifestations. People are saying, I've lost trust in authority, and that's in the media as well as governments; the loss of trust is quite widespread. The second is nostalgia: people say the past was better, and some people say let's return to it. And the third is this social cohesion point, that people feel immigration, or often the lack of integration, is a huge problem.

But these are the surface manifestations that they see of what's happening to society. When you dig deep down into what people really think about what's happening to their own lives, two things become really obvious, and this is where Andy and others in Europe, and across America as well, have got to deal with it.

The first is financial disappointment. There is no doubt that people's expectations, and this goes quite far up the income scale, are not being met by their experience. They've been taught to believe that things are always going to get better. They've been taught to believe that the next generation will always be better off than the last. And now there's a sense that this is not happening. So unless you solve the economic problem, and we can come to that, I don't think you can move forward.

But the second thing is fascinating, because I didn't really expect to find it: people have got a strong sense of civic decline. They feel that if they're in trouble, there is nobody and no organisation they can turn to. Faith group membership is dwindling; trade union membership has halved; even the Mothers' Union and the Women's Institute: there used to be a million in Britain, and now there are less than half a million. Go through all the different organisations: working men's clubs, four million, now one million. These are the British manifestations, but it's happening all across Europe, and to a large extent in America too, which has had a history of civic organisations.

Britain's Collapse in Community and Civic Life

Can politics fix that?

Well, we'll deal with economics later, but civic decline. What we found is that 45% of people in Britain say they're not a member of anything. They're not a member of a church, a faith group, a trade union; they're not a member of a civic organisation, not even a sporting club. In fact, the biggest membership organisations are sporting organisations. They've replaced churches and trade unions as the main focus of local activity. But these are keep-fit classes and parkruns and so on and so forth.

So what can you do about this? During the resistance in the Second World War, people were asked at the end of it what made them join the resistance. And the biggest answer was not, as you might have thought, "I believe in this cause." It was: someone I respected asked me to join. So people in their own communities may think it's not important to persuade others to become members, but I think it's really important. Look, if half the members of your community are not involved in anything, you don't really have the kind of community you can call a community.

And I keep saying: if the physical infrastructure broke down, the roads and the railways, there'd be an immediate call for action. If the financial infrastructure broke down, if you couldn't get money out of the banks, there'd be panic. But the civic infrastructure is breaking down in so many different parts of the country, and we've got to think about what we can do about it.

So I would say, yes, encourage people to join. I think you've got to find better public spaces, so that people feel comfortable in them; the old sort of hall is not going to be the comfortable place for people to come and join. I think the internet has a role to play in guiding people towards face-to-face meetings. We're finding that in my home town of Kirkcaldy. We've got a Facebook site that has 50,000, 60,000 people on it, almost bigger than the population of Kirkcaldy, because people outside now are wanting to join it, and it is leading people to link up with each other. So the internet is not all bad, though there's the problem of people siloing themselves in places where they can only talk to people they agree with.

There are many things you can do about it. Young people particularly: if they become isolated, then it's a huge social problem. It's not just an individual problem. So I think we should encourage exchanges, young people meeting other people. Erasmus is a programme that allows British students to meet European students, but we don't actually have a programme for Scots to meet English to meet Welsh to meet Irish, and there's probably something we could do about that.

There were attempts to think about a National Citizen Service: not military service, but an attempt to reach out to people at 16 or 18 to create exactly those kinds of links, and opportunities for more structured voluntary activity. And the Scandinavians have tried this. Should we not be leaning into this?

There are two or three countries that have it. In my view it should be optional. But if you think of young people from 16 to 25, there are a million not working at the moment. And the options available to these young people have narrowed over recent years, not expanded. We had the Educational Maintenance Allowance system to encourage young people to stay on at school. And I think one of the problems now is that too many young people have left school at 16 without any qualifications whatsoever. We're finding that pre-apprenticeship training is necessary, because people just don't have the qualifications even to start an apprenticeship.

So there are lots of things that have got to be done, but one option could be community service. It could be an option, not something people are compelled to do. There are so many opportunities you can see in each community to improve the environment and improve what's happening, and out of that will emerge new young leaders. I think we underestimate the potential of young people to be leaders in their own right. So yes, something could be done in this area. And it's really important to think about it, because if you've got a whole generation of young people growing up with no church or faith group, no civics of any great significance in the school curriculum, not getting jobs, not getting opportunities, not meeting other people, that is not a good society.

Did New Labour Mismanage Globalisation?

You set out the collapse of this world order: the backlash against economic change, the rise in protectionism, the fracturing of trust, the return of great power rivalry. And this really struck me: "the spread of globalisation whose effects we did not fully understand." Do you think we, New Labour, bear any responsibility for either the collapse in trust or this sense that people no longer feel that economic progress is for them?

I used to have quite long arguments with people like Alan Greenspan, who was a friend of mine and was head of the Federal Reserve, and with some of the American leaders, because I always thought you had to manage globalisation. Globalisation was a fact. It wasn't going to change during that period. There was the opening up of markets. There were the global supply chains, which meant that maybe 30 or 40 countries could be involved in the production of any one particular good, like a car. In many senses this was a good thing. A lot of people did well out of it. A lot of poverty was reduced because we opened up the world economy.

But we did not manage globalisation. My argument with the Americans at that time was partly that you can manage globalisation well or badly, and if we manage it badly, there are going to be bad results. And now we are seeing some of those results, because people don't feel it's fair. They think it was a free-for-all, but they don't think it was fair to all. And we've got to do something about the unfairness, if you like, that is attached to a globalisation that ran out of control at certain points.

And of course the financial crisis was the worst aspect of it. These were mainly American banks, but the British banks were going along with it too, and the German banks were also involved in the subprime markets. We just didn't have enough information about what was happening inside some of these institutions, like Lehman Brothers. They were all failing in different ways, but the main factor was that they were taking risks without the capital, without the backing to manage the risks if they went wrong. So if they invested in the property market, the minute the property market went down, these banks were completely at sea and in danger. And I've always stressed since that the financial regulation some people are trying to relax now is absolutely essential, because financial institutions can easily run out of control. You had capitalism without capital. They were running themselves without capital, and so we had to do something about it.

So in the bailout, we had austerity for the people, and we had a bailout for the people who caused this damn thing. Is that not also part of what's going wrong?

Well, I was furious, of course, because there was no legal case, apart from one, against bankers for the mistakes, but also for the recklessness with people's money that caused the financial crisis. But austerity should never have happened. America came out of the financial recession under Obama and started to grow again. In Britain, growth had returned when we were in government, but the Conservatives pushed us back into recession with austerity. And then we had ten years, effectively even more, of 1% growth or less. We had been growing at 2.5%. And that is the key to prosperity, by the way: an economy has to grow. You've got to be able to create resources for your public services, but you've also got to create resources so that people can see their earnings rise. Our economy grew by only 1%, and that is the problem we've got today. Britain and the rest of Europe have got to have an economy that is growing far faster than it is at the moment, while taking into account the environmental considerations that are really important.

Why Britain and Europe Fell Behind America

Gordon, obviously there are deep political disagreements about this. But one analysis of why the American economy was roughly the same size as the European economies in 2008 and is now 50% larger (and this isn't just Britain, this is Europe in general) is that the American capital markets are much more flexible. Americans take much more risk. There's just much more money to pump into these big AI startups. And one of the problems European and British firms face is a general sense that if they need investment to go to the next stage, they have to go to the United States.

Rory, this is a scale-up problem. We're pretty good at start-ups. We're pretty good at spin-offs from the universities. We've got, what, 14 or 17 of the top 100 universities in Britain; four of the top ten in the world are British. But we spin off and we start up, and then we don't seem to be able to scale up. Now, you're right, the American capital markets are deep, and Europe does not have a unified capital market. So I would suggest we have to do something about that. Whatever you say about rejoining different European institutions, we should have a Europe-wide capital market that people can draw on, so that companies like Oxford Ionics last year, or DeepMind, all these companies that get to a certain stage in Britain, don't feel they've got to go to America to get the capital.

Hermann Hauser, who's the great entrepreneur in this, says that the last 12 unicorns he was involved in, that's companies valued above a billion dollars, all went to America. So that is a problem the budget could address. We've got to do more to encourage scale-ups. I think there's a European scale-up fund at the moment. Britain has joined Horizon, which is the research and scientific fund, but I think we could join the financial instruments as well, if we could find a way to do so. And then we could benefit from that. It's a five-billion scale-up fund; it could become ten. I think he said it could become a hundred.

So you say it's about risk and security. I think it's about innovation. And Britain has innovation. We've got it in medical technology, brilliant medical technology. We've got it obviously in environmental technology: wind, wave, nuclear fusion, Rolls-Royce and all that stuff with the smaller nuclear reactors. We've got it in the creative arts, media, film. But what we need to do is underpin that with support for scale-up.

Somehow we've had a blind spot about innovation. We've done lots of planning reform, infrastructure reform, great stuff: skills, employability, housing reform. That's all been part of the first two years of the government. But I think we should focus on innovation, because that's a unique selling point. Britain is the innovative nation. We did a survey on this, and only 36% of people believe that Britain is a world leader in science. It's not true. People think of the past. They think of James Watt, they think of the telephone and the television. But they don't think of the vaccine brilliance, being one of the first to create a vaccine. We've obviously got Tim Berners-Lee and what he's done with the World Wide Web. We've got all the advances taking place in quantum computing, where Britain has been in the lead and is in danger of losing it. So I would be backing innovation. We should be the innovation nation. That's what we should be talking about. It gives us something to tell the world we're good at, and that we can be even better at in future.

The China Shock and the Return of Protectionism

Final one on economics for me: China shock 2.0. There's a real sense that Europe is in trouble because China has a currency that's too cheap and a subsidised industrial policy, and it's essentially eating the European economy alive. What should we be doing about China and its economic policy?

Well, I know what Europe is about to do. It's going to put protectionist tariffs up against China. China, I think, is in a sprint at the moment to get as much of the global market as possible before something happens. And America and China are at odds with each other. That means we're in a very dangerous world. So we've got to look at the long term: what role can China play in this new world? Clearly the question is America versus China. How is that going to work itself out?

I think we've got to think our way through this. In my view we have got to get a coalition of countries, neither China nor, unfortunately, at the moment, America, which would not join it, that sets down principles of cooperation. Because look, the UN Charter was 1945. The UN Charter did lots of great things, and it still should be the central piece of the way we think about the rules-based order. But it didn't deal with climate change. It didn't deal with global public goods. It didn't deal with international terrorism. It didn't deal with the relationship between the South and the North, which has changed fundamentally. It didn't deal with women's equality, for that matter. So we need a new set of principles of cooperation.

And this is where I think China and America are put to the challenge. Because all the other countries, let's say 120 or 130 countries, have agreed to most of the things I would want to talk about where there's international cooperation. If they agreed, here are the principles of cooperation, then it's not China calling the shots, as they would like to do, or America calling the shots, as they'd like to do. They have to respond to what countries like Britain, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Korea, Japan want, and all these countries want roughly the same things. That's where I think we put pressure on.

So in the short term, you're going to have this protectionism against China. And China, of course, is subsidising a lot of these cars and solar panels and so on, so they're making them a lot cheaper than they would otherwise be. In the short term, we're still going to have the Trump tariffs, so you're still going to have that protectionism. But we should set out a course that says: look, we are the majority of the population of the world, we're going to come together, and please join us, but if you don't join us, we're still going ahead.

Can the World Move On Without American Leadership?

But Gordon, you've got seven principles for your idea of a new global charter: human dignity and human rights; sovereign equality; rule of law; collective action on shared threats to life, peace and security; duty of states to citizens; equitable partnership; and collective responsibility for shared global risks. It is incredible, as I was reading that, to think of it with Trump in mind: no, no, no, no, no, no. Tell me if this is what you're arguing: a bit like Mark Carney, that we almost have to give up on United States global leadership, and frame something new in which we play a leadership role, and Europe is central to that.

Those countries who agree that these are the principles, and I think most sensible people would agree these are the principles on which the future should be based, have got to come together. I do not rule out America joining in. Trump, by the way, talks about reciprocity all the time. He wants to say that America's been hard done by, and therefore they're going to penalise countries that have been difficult to them. But the principle of reciprocity runs through this as well. If he thought about it, I think he would have to say that fair trade is a two-way street. So in some cases Trump might agree with us, or might be forced to agree with us.

But I agree. Look, he published a map yesterday with basically an American flag over Greenland, Iceland. He included Iceland, which he probably didn't realise he was including, because it's probably AI-generated. And he had Mexico, and he had Greenland. I read an interview he did, I think it was in 2020 or 2021, and he said: I love maps. Greenland, such a huge place. I'm a property developer. We want that. And of course he'd looked at the Mercator map, the old map of the world, where Greenland looks the same size as Africa, and one and a half times the size of America. So he thought, if I get this, then America is one and a half times bigger. And he hadn't actually looked at the real world, where Greenland is a fourteenth of the size of Africa. It's just big on the map. He's got it wrong, because he looked at a map and didn't get the practical information, and Greenland is a relatively small country.

How does this start? Is Europe the obvious leader of this? I mean, Mark Carney is calling a lot of the shots on this, but is it Europe, a new, stronger, bigger Europe?

I think the key to this is recognising that it's got to be the global North plus the global South. If we try to have another European-only initiative and then say the rest of the world has got to follow us, we'll fail. But I'm actually talking to leaders in Africa. We're having a meeting at the United Nations on the principles of cooperation. Korea wants to be part of this, in my view. Japan would want to be part of this.

The Threat of a New Nuclear Arms Race

If you look at the polling we've done this year, the worry people now have is about peace and war. And it's really interesting: in the last year the balance has really shifted. People were worried about trade, they worried about standards of living, they worried about all these things, and still are. But most of the world, if you ask them what their biggest worry is now, says it's the conflicts and the threat of war.

And what's happening, unfortunately, is that nine countries have got nuclear weapons, but there are nine other countries that think they are now having to consider them. North Korea's got nuclear weapons, so Korea thinks: if America's not going to provide shelter for us, we're going to have to do it. Japan then thinks it has to do it. Then look at the Middle East: Israel's got nuclear weapons, and people say, well, what's Saudi Arabia going to do? It wants nuclear weapons; the UAE; then you'd have Egypt, and then you'd have Turkey. And we've now got, even in Europe, Poland saying they may have to have nuclear weapons, and Germany thinking: if we can't get a nuclear shield we can guarantee, then what do we do? So that's about another nine countries. From a time when we thought we'd have only nine nuclear weapon states, we could have nearly 20. That is a huge change in the world, and of course it makes the prospects of peace more distant.

And then there's the combination of AI with this. I don't know if you know this: there's a study done at King's College London.

I saw that. I read that in the book.

When AI systems were asked what you do when there's a tension between two countries, 95% of the answers ended with escalation and escalation, and they ended up saying: fire a nuclear weapon. If we allowed AI to have that kind of control, or even that kind of advisory role, then we're into a world that is very, very dangerous indeed.

So these countries I'm talking about, outside America and Russia and of course China: if they come together, I think we shouldn't underestimate them. 120 countries have now come together on a treaty to deal with crimes against humanity. The same number of countries came together on a treaty on the law of the sea. About the same number came together behind the judgment of the International Court of Justice that climate change has to be dealt with as a legal issue, which was promoted by Vanuatu, one of the countries most affected. So there are countries coming together, but I think we've got to take it up to a new level: we want to cooperate even if you don't. We want a world where it's not us versus them, and it's not a zero-sum mindset, where if I do well, you have to do badly, which is of course the way some people, like President Trump, may see the world.

The opinion polling we have shows that cooperation is what the people of the world want. And interestingly, it's what the people of America now want. Opinion has moved in America in the last year or two, and people now want to cooperate. We asked a question: would you be prepared to cooperate with other countries even if it meant some compromise of your national interests? And we've now got 57% generally saying that, and about 60% in America and Europe. That is really interesting: people recognise that, even if it means no America First or Russia First or China First, it is in their interest to cooperate by coming together, even if it means sacrificing some part of the national interest.

Why Modern Politics Makes Long-Term Thinking So Difficult

One of the things that's very striking, listening to you, is how very differently you think about the world, view the world and describe the world from many of the current working politicians we interview. And I wonder whether, looking back at your own life, you can see something in the nature of modern politics, or of being a leader today, which makes it quite difficult to think or frame things in that way, whether it's changes in the expectations of voters, or social media, or the structures of politics. Essentially, our experience when we're interviewing current elected leaders is that they don't think in this way.

It's a 24-hour news cycle. Alastair, you must be the first to accept this: everything could be only short-term if you allowed it to happen, because every day you've got something you've got to react to; every day there's a new event.

I tell the story about President Kennedy in the early 1960s coming to London to meet Harold Macmillan, and Macmillan is still asleep. It's a true story. Macmillan's asleep, so Kennedy is brought in, given a cup of coffee and a copy of the Times to read while people awaken the Prime Minister. I know Macmillan was an old man by then. But if that happened now, the split-second timing, not even being at the door to greet him, offering him a copy of the Times and saying, I'm too busy to talk to you, would become an international scandal.

When we did the G20 in 2009, one of the questions was which car was going to arrive first, and which car would arrive second, third and fourth. Sarkozy wanted to be the person who arrived last, because he was president of the European Council, and Obama had to be last because he was President of America. If you got that wrong... These are small things, but it's because you're in a 24-hour news cycle. You could be asked what you thought of an incident in Coronation Street or Emmerdale or EastEnders, and the Prime Minister would be expected to know his view on that issue.

How do we break through that? Are you finding that easier out of office than in?

Well, of course it's easier, because you're not dealing with the day-to-day problems in the sense you had to. So the important thing is to realise that it is an issue. When it came to the financial crisis, I made a mistake, because I didn't explain it properly to the public. We had a view, which nobody initially accepted, that this was not a liquidity problem. It was a solvency problem, and you couldn't solve it just by getting the rotten assets out of a few banks. You had to fundamentally restructure them, and nobody agreed with us at the beginning. I spent ages trying to work out what the problem was and then trying to find a way through it, and I didn't explain it to the public. So the Conservatives were able to say, oh, it's a debt problem made in Downing Street, the government's to blame, all that sort of stuff. But in fact it was a financial scandal that had started in America and had to be solved by countries like us.

So you've got to be able to get to the bottom of the problem, and that demands a kind of leadership. You've got to be able to explain what you're doing, which demands a particular kind of leadership as well. And at the same time, remember, you're dealing with all sorts of other things during a major financial crisis, and people are saying that the tie you're wearing, or something, becomes an issue. So I think leaders have got to think carefully about how they lead. First of all, you've got to have a clear view of what you're trying to achieve. Secondly, you've got to be able to communicate, which I probably was not good enough at, certainly was not good enough at. And you've got to deal with the immediate. So you've got these three issues that every day you've really got to think about.

Do you think Andy's got those three qualities?

Of course, of course. But look, the challenge is when events come in. Harold Wilson said, you know, events, unexpected events, and you've got to deal with them, wasn't it?

Not Macmillan? That was Macmillan.

Harold. Did you say Wilson?

Yeah, I was thinking about Wilson. Harold Macmillan said "events". What was Harold Wilson's great one?

Well, Wilson was good at what he was talking about: clearing out the deadwood from the boardrooms, and the white heat of the technological revolution. He was good at words. And we've got to talk about that now, because that's the innovation nation. In the 1960s we didn't have much evidence of the innovation nation. We had Concorde, but it only started in the 1970s. We had TSR-2, the strike aircraft, and we cancelled it. I think the only evidence of the innovation nation at the time was actually the Beatles. But now we've got so much evidence, something to build on. So I think it's having the long term in view, while also recognising that if you don't deal with the short term, you lose out badly.

Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and Friendships in Politics

My final one. When people look back at New Labour, they often talk about you, Tony Blair, Alastair, Peter Mandelson. And one of the things that puzzles me, because it relates to your point about politics, is: is it difficult to keep long-term friendships going in politics? For a general listener, is there something about the nature of being a politician which makes relationships and friendships quite tough?

I think it's difficult, obviously, because politics is full of personalities, and they've all got their individual qualities, and everybody wants to be heard. But I think the noise around it is equally difficult, because there are all sorts of people around you, the media building it up. This is the issue in Britain: we tend to see issues purely through personalities. We tend to think of ourselves as empiricists, pragmatic people who don't think in big ideas. One of the things your broadcasts are doing is talking about ideas, and that's really important. But if you look at the press coverage today, I think it's more about the King and his sons, and it's all seen in terms of personalities.

Now, when I was in government, I think that was a very limited part of what the issues were. We were actually trying to do things. We actually had policies: what we were trying to do on child poverty, on rebuilding the health service, on schools and education. And all these things are forgotten, because people just talk about personalities. I don't really think that was the biggest issue when you were dealing with problems. And of course, people have got strong views.

If you look at Britain, people will probably write up the last 15 years as X number of prime ministers, X number of chancellors, as if that is the story of Britain. But really the story of Britain is trying to overcome an economic problem, where nobody has satisfactorily got us back to growth. And as a result there's austerity, as a result there are the public services, as a result people's standards of living are really not rising. That's the big issue. We should be addressing that, rather than who did what when, who talked to whom and who didn't talk to whom at any one time.

In the end, if politics is going to be helpful to people... People say politics is the art of the possible. I say politics is trying to make the desirable possible. That's where our focus should be, rather than on individual personalities: what they do, where they live, who they talk to, who their friends are, how much money they have and everything else. It's got to be about ideas, because in the end the only thing that will change lives is whether the ideas we have, if they're good, are translated into policies that can benefit people's lives.

Well, your book has got plenty of ideas. But before you go: the day you left office, you stole my tie.

I've never had it, but I didn't know.

He was wearing a blue tie. You said, I cannot go out on my last day wearing a blue tie. I had a red tie. You took my tie. You walked down the street with it.

I've never seen it since. I think a very good charity benefited from it at the time. I will try and get the information on how much money was raised by the auction. And thank you. Thank you very much.

Alastair and Rory Debrief the Gordon Brown Interview

Something that's completely obvious to you, so obvious that it's boring for you and you won't want to talk about it, but is less obvious to the audience, is that this is somebody you know professionally better than almost anyone on earth. You worked with Gordon Brown hand in glove for so much of your life. So this is not just a normal interview. It's almost like interviewing a family member, somebody you have a lot of history with.

And it is history, and it's very up-and-down history. I could tell he bristled at your question about relationships and friendships in politics, because they are very, very difficult. And it was interesting, because it was quite an innocent question.

Yeah. In a conversation about global politics, it was the only one. But at the end of it, he very much teased me about it.

Yeah, because he talks about your podcast and your broadcasts. I love the way he talks about your programme and your broadcasts: you talk about big ideas, but at the end of it you talk about personalities, and that's not important. But of course friendships and personalities and relationships are important.

If I track back: because I'm so closely identified with Tony Blair, people probably aren't aware that when the two of them first got elected, I was much closer to Gordon. He was the senior of the two, so from a journalistic perspective he was in a way more interesting. I worked on the Mirror. He had a weekly column in the Daily Record, which I used to help him write. And when I talked about working with Gordon on speeches, it's because he's just relentless and never gives up. So he's a stressful guy to work with.

And then of course, there's no getting away from this: I don't think he's ever fully forgiven me for backing Tony Blair. Not backing Tony Blair exactly, but in 1994 expressing my strongly held journalistic view that Tony would win the leadership election if there were one.

And Gordon would have expected you to be with him, or would have hoped you would be with him.

And I also think, even though a lot of Scots might think I'm English, Gordon sees me as very Scottish.

Right.

And even though Tony was born in Scotland, he's seen as very English.

Yeah.

And I think there was a little bit of that. But through it all, there were people around Tony who said, you know, Gordon is so difficult, he's this, he's that. But what you saw today is why Tony always took the view that you needed him around, because he's so smart, he's so clever, he's so driven, and he is capable of thinking big thoughts and then putting them into action.

But it was difficult. And on the question of personalities, there are people around you, and he had people around him who made my life hell at times. There was one point where I said, look, you'd better understand: if that guy Charlie Whelan's not out, you've got a real problem. But I've always respected Gordon, because he is ultimately a big, big personality, a big character, a big political character with big ideas. It was often difficult. But then, of course, I went back in. The reason we were joking about the ties is that I was there right at the end, having gone back for his election campaign.

Why Gordon Brown's Premiership Didn't Work Politically

Yeah. So for younger listeners who don't remember this, it was an amazing moment. Tony Blair had been this unbelievably successful New Labour Prime Minister and achieved an incredible majority. Just to put it in context, when I was at school, studying politics A-level in the late '80s and early '90s, the conventional wisdom was that Labour could never win again. The structures of British politics permanently excluded them. They were doomed, because they'd been losing since '79. And then Tony Blair wins this incredible majority in '97.

And then eventually he hands over to Gordon Brown. The story in public, which I think must be broadly true, is that Gordon Brown was cross because he thought Blair should have handed over earlier. But eventually he inherits; he gets the crown. And people like me were very taken with the idea that here was this incredible intellectual titan coming in as Prime Minister, and he was going to fix all the problems we thought were there in the Blair government. I actually wrote an article for the New York Times in 2009, which David Cameron's never forgiven me for, I think, where I said Gordon Brown represented the moral seriousness of the new politics, much better than what I saw as Cameron's more lightweight approach to things.

And of course, it turned out that in pure, raw political terms, it didn't work. And he seems to be suggesting that one of the reasons for this is communication. Basically, the account he gave us is: I had all the right ideas, I was doing all the right things around the financial crisis, the problem is I couldn't communicate it. And by God you understand why, because I'm sitting there while he says the problem was not a liquidity problem, it was a solvency problem, and even I am trying to work out what the hell he's saying. So even nearly 20 years after, he still hasn't found a form of words to explain to the general public what he's trying to say. But I think that's why he was saying he finds life easier now, because he doesn't have to do all that stuff.

I think the thing about communication is that he can be a brilliant communicator. Some of the best speeches of the New Labour era (and speeches, as you know, I think are an incredibly important part of communication) were his. They were both very good speakers, he and Tony, in very different ways. But I know what he means. I've said to you before: my mum always used to say she thought Gordon would have been a great politician in the radio age. And that wasn't about how he looked.

Although he doesn't particularly like going on camera.

No, but it was about the fact that he's got an amazing voice. He's got a real rhythm to his voice, which I think is important in politics. But I think what he means by communication is that he's one of those guys who thinks: right, I'm doing this incredibly important job of trying to save the world economy. Let me do it. I shouldn't have to be talking about it the whole time. And when I talk about it, I should be able to talk about it in my terms: solvency against liquidity.

Correct. And what should have been happening (and to be fair, I think Alistair Darling did a pretty good job on this) is that there should have been other people around him doing the sort of communication he's talking about. That's the first time I've really heard him say that, though.

The solvency-against-liquidity thing is really interesting there, because not only does it not work with the retail voter, it doesn't work with most journalists, and I would guarantee 95% of Members of Parliament would have no idea what he's talking about. That is a problem.

When he came in, he was asking what these live events are that you're doing, and you said, we did the O2. So, what, 15,000 people? How do you communicate to 15,000 people in the same space? And the truth is, you communicate in exactly the same way as if you were communicating to ten people. But I think he, a little bit like Keir Starmer actually, didn't enjoy the modern stuff of politics, the stuff I'm afraid you do have to do. If you're a political leader today and you're not really mastering social media, or having people do it for you, you've got a problem.

And the Coronation Street and Emmerdale thing was also revealing. Those are slightly limited, dated references, and part of, I guess, a general sense that he basically doesn't like that kind of soap opera culture.

Yeah, he hates it. He may have forgotten, but one of my low points as communications director and press secretary was when, in a briefing, I inserted Tony Blair into a storyline in Coronation Street. So maybe he hasn't forgotten that.

But this is where life gets really difficult and complicated. People very, very close to Gordon think that I'm anti-Gordon Brown.

Right.

So that's part of the history here.

Which I've never been. And it's also true that I sat next to him at dinner and had got him to promise to come on the podcast, and he didn't come.

We've been doing this for four years, and we've finally got him, for which congratulations. And it's true he doesn't like Tories. But my suspicion is that the four years is more like me trying to get David Cameron on. There's some personal thing going on here.

No, I think it's more that he, and some of the people with him, would worry that I'd want to relive the whole Tony Blair–Gordon Brown thing. But the truth is, I'm bored to death by the whole Tony Blair–Gordon Brown thing. I'm really happy not talking about it. Because what I've always liked about Gordon is his Scottishness, his sort of Kirkcaldy-ness: the fact that he's dedicated his book to Kirkcaldy.

Yeah. And his Facebook page with 50,000 people.

Exactly.

Is it not a bit of a nightmare, though, being Member of Parliament for Kirkcaldy, given that you have a former Member of Parliament and Prime Minister sitting in Kirkcaldy on the Facebook page, still inhabiting it?

Possibly. Possibly.

But if you were to do an index of that half-hour, 35-minute conversation we just had, there was a lot in it.

Incredible. There were a lot of different countries, thoughts, ideas. That's what I like about it. There are no ums and ahs. He packs a lot in. It felt much longer than 35 minutes. He speaks so quickly, so concisely; there's so much info. It's beautiful.

The Problems With Brown's Vision for the Future

He will be frustrated that he didn't get to talk more about economic policy. When I sat next to him at dinner, he could obviously provide a 45-minute lecture on what the Chancellor should do and how to restart the British economy.

I do think, though, if I were going to get on to the policy problems, there are probably three that I can see. One is that it's absolutely true that membership of voluntary organisations is collapsing. But it's also true, as you suggested, that it's unbelievably difficult for the government to do much about getting people to rejoin voluntary organisations, particularly if he says we're not going to make it compulsory.

The second problem, I think, is that there's a real tension between the fact that he's still very much in favour of free trade, or some version of free trade, and the reality of what China means for European economies: the China shock, all this subsidised stuff. What do you do about China?

And the third thing is the gap between daily domestic politics, increasingly populist and fractured, and this idea of reconstructing a big global South–European alliance. Because if you were to put it to Keir Starmer or Kemi Badenoch or Merz or Macron and say, what do you think about this, they might say: well, it's all very well in theory, but my voters... This is not their priority. This is not their language. In fact, increasingly, the way voters from left and right view the world is actually against many of the things you put in your list.

Yeah, but I wonder if there's a role for this. There are so many of them. We've got seven... in fact no, we've got more than that. We've got how many, ten living prime ministers or something like that, if you go back to John Major. I wonder if one of the roles for former presidents and former prime ministers isn't to do a lot of the legwork on this.

It's very interesting. He's got a passage in the book where he talks about the Beveridge Report. I can't remember the exact number, but it was a massive bestseller; people were reading it.

Now, we're not in that sort of world any more. But I think if somebody outside day-to-day politics and the 24/7 media were to put together a group of people, not as politicians, with the brief to create the space for a new middle-power infrastructure, whose messaging is basically, we can't rely on America and we don't particularly want China, great if they want to get involved in some of the arguments, but anybody else is welcome... I can see that. You remember the Nelson Mandela Elders group?

Yeah. Yeah.

A sort of bigger version of that. And I could see somebody like Gordon playing a big role.

I think it's the power of ideas. I've always been struck by the fact that in about 1982, I think, four or five slightly eccentric Scots sat in the upper room of a pub thinking about a constitution for Scottish devolution. And 15 years later, that was almost the blueprint of what you guys delivered. Unless somebody does the thinking and lays out the ideas... In fact, I'd make the same point about AI. We all say that AI is dangerous and we should be regulating AI, but nobody's actually worked out in advance the details of a charter and what this regulation is, so that when the crisis happens, something's there.

Rishi Sunak, if we were to interview him, and I hope we can get Rishi, also thinks in that way, though he might be more tech-focused. John Major, of course, is quite interesting, and Tony Blair does lots of this stuff. It'd be interesting to see whether one could get them together.

Or with others. Look at Malcolm Turnbull in Australia, Paul Keating, Kevin Rudd. There are so many, because politicians are becoming leaders younger, and they're leaving younger. You've got all this experience and thought and analysis, and I just think we've got to use them better.

Final one, though. What I often notice in meeting these people is that very, very quickly they become pretty high-minded and global, and they lose their rooting in polling, voters, day-to-day politics surprisingly quickly. I always felt this when a former leader came in to see me when I was development secretary. I remember thinking: he hasn't been out of office very long, but he no longer sounds like a politician or feels like a politician.

But interestingly, the answer to that is this book. Gordon was never massively... well, he was interested in polling, but polling is at the heart of this book, this massive global poll. And one of the things I really like about the book is that he does weave in and out of the local and the global. One of the best chapters is actually about Kirkcaldy.

But it's also inevitable, because of the other thing with politicians. You could see this: he didn't want to say anything that allowed anybody listening to pick up "Gordon Brown tells Burnham to do X." And I think all former prime ministers feel they don't necessarily want to get into that. Some of them want to, like Ted Heath used to with Thatcher. But most of them, the good ones (I'm not saying Ted Heath wasn't good in lots of ways), don't want to be judged by what they say about their successors. So when I asked about Andy Burnham, of course he said yes. He'd have said that about any Labour prime minister.

Because to be honest, it's taken a long time to persuade him to come in. I think he'll be pleased and relieved that we did actually just talk about big stuff.

You don't think I blew it with my question?

Yeah, yeah. Which I thought was a very, very good question, and nicely framed, but...

How would you have answered it, just to finish?

Well, I would have answered it differently, though I wasn't surprised at the way he answered. I probably would have leaned in a little bit more, because he's actually got a bit of a dig at the Board of Peace in this book. If you go to the index, you won't see "Blair, Tony", but you will see "Board of Peace". I would have leaned in a little bit more. But this is different, this is why he's different, and I was never a prime minister. I would have said: look, it's a bit like a rock band. When we were all on song together, it was amazing. That can't last forever. People make mistakes, people fall out. And I was angry about this, and I was angry about that. Okay, maybe people go on about the Granita thing, but maybe Tony did stay a bit too long. I think that led to a little bit of it. Not, you know, "it's all about you terrible media people who just want to say it's all a soap opera."

Thank you. I thought it was good. I enjoyed it. I think our listeners will have liked it. Very worthwhile. Very interesting. Thank you very much. See you soon.