Reading between Gordon’s lines

Gordon Brown’s new book, Britain’s Everyday Heroes (Mainstream, £10.99), is yet another important clue to the Prime Minister’s political trajectory. In inspiration, it is part Cobbett’s Rural Rides, part Eliot’s homage to “unhistoric acts”. In his portraits of 33 individuals engaged in various forms of service and community work, Gordon identifies those he regards as the “true celebrities” of our times, and hails “an age of engagement: with our culture and communities energised and improved by the choices and actions of individuals – people power.” In such enterprise, he says, we can see – you guessed it – the “greatness of Britain” as well as the “timeless values of the good society”. Political bromides? Not at all. This is Brown storming on to the terrain marked out by David Cameron in his “social responsibility” campaign. The crucial difference, made clear in this book, is that Brown does not buy the Tory theme of the “Broken Society”, so well described in IDS’s recent