Jonathan Freedland, who writes for the left-leaning British newspaper The Guardian, has a fascinating look at Gordon Brown, who succeeded Tony Blair earlier this year as the Prime Minister of Great Britain. It would see, in Freedland’s estimation, that Brown may not, after all, be Paul Martin to Blair’s Jean Chretien:
Born the son of a Presbyterian minister in 1951, Gordon Brown was exposed daily to the human cost of industrial decline. The poor appeared at the door of the Kirkcaldy manse, asking for help. From the pulpit, his father urged on both his community and his sons the duty of hard work and service to others, railing against inequality and the transience of riches. The young Brown was writing political commentaries for his brother's hand-produced newsletter when he was barely a teenager and was so accomplished a student that he enrolled at Edinburgh University when he was sixteen. However a rugby injury, which detached the retinas of both his eyes, meant that he spent six months of his freshman year in the hospital, bedridden and in complete darkness. The experience left him with a sentimental faith in the NHS that had nursed him to recovery, while confronting the fear of permanent blindness seems to have sealed Brown's identification with the vulnerable. He emerged blind in his left eye, his right damaged but functioning—though he still needs to print his speeches in large type and to rest them on a bulked-up dispatch box in the House of Commons in order to see them. An ancillary effect was on his face. Not only did the dead left eye alter his appearance, but one of the four operations was botched, so that a smile no longer triggered the appropriate facial muscles. The result is the dour countenance which has become so central to the popular conception of Brown. It means that one of the many shifts of June 27 was the transition from a prime minister who smiled all the time to a prime minister who cannot smile naturally at all.
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[Brown] had been in Number Ten for about thirty-six hours when a car bomb was discovered in London's West End, followed by a failed attack on Glasgow airport. There was no sign of panic. Brown did not rush before the cameras insisting that he was taking personal charge or proclaiming a struggle for civilization, as his predecessor might have done. Instead he had his home secretary, Jacqui Smith, report to the public, making good on his promise to replace the presidentialism of Blair with a return to cabinet government.
When he did comment, following the Glasgow attack, he did so plainly and soberly as if discussing a serious crime rather than an act of war. This fitted Brown's disavowal of the phrase “war on terror,” which he believes grants too much status, even dignity, to the murderers of al-Qaeda. The new approach, which instantly took the heat out of the moment, spreading calm rather than panic, won universal plaudits, including from Britain's Muslim communities. A full-page advertisement appeared in several national newspapers a few days later, signed by leading British Muslim organizations, welcoming Brown's efforts and pledging their cooperation in bringing the guilty to justice. Nothing like that had happened under Blair.
There was a similar absence of grandstanding in Brown's handling of midsummer flooding in northern and central England, of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle, and of a financial panic in mid-September which saw a run on one of Britain's largest lenders, the Northern Rock bank (though in that last case Brown's initial invisibility brought criticism that his Macavity-like habit was resurfacing.) Brown felt able to rely on his ministers in part because he had appointed good ones. Even the usually hostile newspapers had to applaud a team which simultaneously conveyed the arrival of a new government— bringing in six ministers under the age of forty—and seemed to fit the right people into the right jobs.
I think it impossible for a Canadian journalist not consider the contrast to what one might describe as Prime Minister Harper’s ‘presidentialism’, although, to be fair, Harper’s party had not been in power for nearly ages prior to his ascension.
And finally, Brown, it seems to me, is the only leader in the Western World, who refuses to acknolwedge that there is any such thing as a “war on terror.”
Brown gave notice as well that he planned to continue the ongoing “drawdown” of British troops from Iraq. Accordingly, September saw the British withdraw 550 men from Basra city, so that Britain's entire presence in Iraq is now confined to Basra airport. More deeply, Brown conveyed an entirely different understanding of what he didn't call the war on terror.