How Gordon sees the world

26 August 2006

Mark Leonard, an authority on Labour foreign policy with strong connections to the government, has spoken to those close to the Chancellor in search of Brown’s notoriously opaque views on international affairs. This is what he discovered

Brown’s allies are increasingly anxious to break with the Blair era. Their attempt to heal the wounds of Iraq in the Labour party will take them into the realm of foreign pol-icy. So who might Brown look to as a role model for his progressive foreign policy? There was a clue at a recent seminar that the Chancellor hosted with Bill Clinton which began with a joke about the former Swedish prime minister Olof Palme going to see Ronald Reagan in Washington: ‘Reagan said, “Isn’t he a communist?” And his advisers said, “No Mr President, he is an anti-communist.” And President Reagan said, “I don’t care what kind of communist he is!”’

Palme remains an iconic figure for centre-left politicians. He had a strong moral core and was the first leader to take international development seriously. But he combined his internationalism with a strong sense of Swedish independence, pursuing friendly but semi-detached relations with the European Union and the United States, and standing aside from military adventurism in Vietnam. What’s more, his principled Moralpolitik provided the legitimacy for Sweden’s aggressive pursuit of its national economic interest. Of course Britain — as a member of the UN Security Council, the fifth biggest economy in the world, and a former imperial power — is very different from Sweden. But the image of Gordon Brown as Olof Palme with nuclear weapons could be a telling one.

Mark Leonard (www.markleonard.net) is director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform and author of Why Europe will run the 21st Century (4th Estate £7. 99).