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A.O.B.
UK politicians' profitable swansongs
Published: 10 January 2012
The more detested a British politician is in his or her own country, it seems, the more popular he or she becomes overseas. A recent article in London’s The Sunday Times reported a secondhand bookseller as refusing a free copy of Gordon Brown’s latest book ‘as it would not sell’. Beyond the Crash is the former British Prime Minister’s recipe for sorting out the world after the 2008 crash.
Mr. Brown was the UK Prime Minister between 2007 and 2010, when his Labour Party lost office. Between 1997 and 2007, moreover, Mr. Brown was Tony Blair’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, and as the Government’s moneybags arguably the more powerful of the two.
The bookseller’s customers may therefore hold Mr. Brown responsible for allowing UK banks to run wild, thereby saddling the UK with vast borrowings as the recession hit. Yet Mr. Brown has hit pay dirt on the US lecture circuit, where he is reported to be pulling in £36,000 a pop.
It was thus with Mrs. Thatcher who, long after her own Conservative Party found her unelectable, was fêted from Washington to Moscow.
As for Mr. Blair, he can hardly show his face in the United Kingdom except under heavy guard, so reviled is he for taking his country into Iraq on what many see as a false prospectus, and then volunteering British troops to plug gaps in the ranks left by reluctant allies other than the USA in the UN force fighting in Afghanistan. Mr. Brown spoke out against neither embroilment. Mr. Blair now makes millions on US lecture circuit and overseas consultancies.
Unlike Mr. Brown, however, Mr Blair is on the British public payroll no longer. He stood down as a Member of Parliament and Party Leader in 2007, breaking a pledge to contest the next General Election. Mr. Blair handed over the party leadership to Mr. Brown, who automatically became Prime Minister.
Mr. Brown did not seek a personal mandate from the electors until the General Election of 2010, an election he lost. The globetrotting Mr. Brown, however, is still on the public payroll as MP for Kirkaldy and Cowdenbeath.
There has been little sign of him in his constituency or at Westminster, so busy has he been lecturing Americans. Meanwhile, Mr. Brown’s constituency is not without its problems, for a local beach risks being the first in the UK to be listed as radiation-contaminated.
Perhaps one reason overseas audiences can revel in such delights as lectures by the UK’s political rejects afford, is that these listeners are secure in the reflection that this is one politician that can do them no harm.
Ross Davies is a Partner of The Governance Partnership