How Gordon sees the world

23 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 instinctive Atlanticism — expressed through his holidays in Cape Cod and an affinity for the work hard/play hard ethic of American society — is much reported but little understood. It is true that he has better connections in Washington than any incumbent prime minister since Churchill, boasting a circle of friends that includes left-wing democrats such as Ted Kennedy and Republicans such as Alan Greenspan. He was part of the crowd — along with Blair and Philip Gould — that made the crusade to the Clinton war room to see how modern elections are won. But Brownites suggest that Brown’s obsession with American public policy has faded with the decline of the Democrats, and the rightward drift of US politics to arguments about guns, gays and abortion: ‘From 1994 to 1997, there was a lot of thinking going on there which was useful to us. Since then there has been not very much thinking going on.’

One senior Brownite implies that Brown will be less susceptible to pressure from Washington than the current Prime Minister. ‘Blair’s policy of “public support, private criticism” has reduced Britain to part of the inter-agency process in Washington. It is an extraordinary position for a sovereign country to find itself in.’ This would suggest that Brown’s style might be more similar to the German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s than Blair’s: positioning himself as an unambiguous Atlanticist — but reserving the right to be critical of American policy in public. Reports of Brown’s first meeting with the American Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, in 2005 suggest that he has already put this philosophy into practice: the meeting soured when Brown lectured his American interlocutor about the importance of increasing aid.