Tonight Gordon Brown announced he will stand down as an MP at the next election. Current political leaders have been paying tribute, with Ed Miliband calling his old boss a ‘towering figure’, while David Cameron said he was ‘someone dedicated to public service and has worked very hard for other people’.
Even those who worked with Brown accept in their tributes to their former boss that he wasn’t perfect, while pointing out the good they felt he did in his long spell in frontline politics. So what were Brown’s good and bad bits? Spectator editor Fraser Nelson and our political editor James Forsyth pick one of each:
Fraser Nelson
Good: He tested to destruction the idea that more money is the remedy for bad public services. Thanks to him, no one will make that mistake again.
Bad: The worst thing Gordon Brown did was to destroy the Blair project and set his joyless bunch of character assassins on anyone who looked like being a talented moderate on the way up inside the Labour Party.
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