Tag Archives: gordon brown

As the Green-gate affair rumbles along in the background, it is hard for those of us who remember early 1970s America to ignore the parallel: an increasingly controlling Executive, fears for personal liberty – and a man at the top with serious personality dysfunction.

Richard Nixon and Gordon Brown do share striking similarities of circumstance and character.

They had puritanical backgrounds with domineering fathers, were intellectual prodigies, intensely private – and awkward in company and public. Both gave the impression of being somehow ‘not quite right’. The 1960 anti-Nixon slogan ‘Would you buy a used car from this Man?’ seemed to fit immediately; and I’ve also now lost count of the number of women who find Brown ‘odd’.

Both were manipulative in their cultivation of ‘poor me’: Nixon the small-town farmboy who ‘never had it easy like the Kennedys’, and Brown the young man agonising about potentially lost sight (a fact the politician kept to himself until he needed a sympathetic leadership image). Dicky wrote about ‘Five Crises’, and Gordon continues to insist he is the best man in crises. Nixon had his Kennedy to envy, and Brown has his Blair to hate: ‘it came naturally to them, but I’ve had to work at it’ is also a shared view – displaying an obvious desire to be seen as noble and heroic.

Fellow sufferers from indecisive depression, they instinctively disappeared from the stage when blame was being assigned. They expected people to accept ridiculous explanations of dubious behaviour, and had associates who insisted they were very nice really – but swore obscenely at aides (or screamed at secretaries) in private.

The observations may perhaps be harsh, but there is something abnormally untrustworthy in the dissembling, shifty nature of these men – an ethical doubt borne out in both cases by shadows and clouds after every episode – and strangely locked cupboards where nobody may go.