Funnily enough, I do not think this is primarily a work of ego. Indeed, to read between the lines, there is more self-reproach than self-congratulation. Time and again, Brown praises those who choose ‘action over inaction’. He writes that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in risking all by declaring his Christian opposition to Nazism, ‘never retreated from his belief that the path to spiritual freedom is through action’. He admires Bonhoeffer’s readiness to stand against ‘the vested interests of friends’. ‘Edith Cavell’s life,’ he says, ‘was not just the sum of chance and accident, but of purposeful resolve at each crossroads in her life’. So often in the past decade, Brown has seemed not only thwarted but indecisive: willing to wound and yet afraid to strike. He fancied himself a political panther. Yet he earned the nickname Macavity. I think part of Brown’s fascination with courage reflects a belief that he has not always displayed it himself. This makes the book all the more interesting. The ninth and missing portrait is of Brown himself, or the man he would like to be: ‘an inner man on the public stage’, as he writes of Kennedy.
The book is not without errors: it was not A. J. P. Taylor but E. P. Thompson who referred to the ‘condescensions of posterity’. Typos such as ‘revolutionlise’ suggest over-hasty proof-reading. But this is self-evidently not a rush job. Courage is extremely well-written: aphoristic (‘conviction is faith unless it is sprung from experience’), evocative (‘the debate now seemed trapped in the amber of that history’), and, most surprising of all, pacy. I must admit that I did not expect a book by Gordon Brown on historical paragons of courage to be a page-turner, but so it is. Indeed, this is the first political book I can think of since Andrew Rawnsley’s Servants of the People to have a claim to be a beach-read. Gordon on the beach? Amazing, I know. But credit where it is due.
Brown agrees with Churchill that ‘courage is the first of all human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others’. He may be right, but I doubt that this moral perspective will be enough in the bear-pit of modern prime ministerial politics. ‘Already’, he writes, ‘the wars and uncertainties of our still young century show these qualities are needed still.’ Indeed they are: but he or any prime minister will struggle to make that the core of his message to Britain in 2007.
In a few days’ time, as the new PM kisses hands, we shall finally see what Brown is made of, and battle will commence. There will be plenty of biffing on all sides, and The Spectator will be at the heart of it. But, for now, declare an amnesty for the time it takes to read 244 pages. Trust me: this is a fine book.
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