Peter Jay, former diplomat and BBC reporter, rides to the defence of Gordon Brown. Jay says the former PM has been unfairly attacked by “the oiks and pseuds” of modern politics. “They seem to have lost sight of the proper role of a political leader as the embodiment of important basic ideas and principles and to have replaced it with a comic book effigy to be assessed by the standards of cheap gossip and sniggering rumour,” writes Jay in the Oldie.
Jay, once British ambassador in Washington and later chief of staff to Robert Maxwell, as well as becoming economics editor of the BBC, makes his remarks in a review of Bill Keegan’s book Saving the World? Gordon Brown Reconsidered.
Jay admits that it is an “improbable concept” to praise Brown but he has a go. Critics of Brown’s personality are dismissed as “witless” for concentrating on such minor matters instead of appraising his economic record. For Jay, Brown is a greater man than rival modern politicians (is he thinking of Blair? or Cameron?) who “tack and duck and wave and smile and smirk and have not a thought, still less an ideal, in their shallow heads”. Jay may be wrong about Brown’s economic record but is there not something magnificent in his defence of “the Big Clunking Fist”?
