Moonlighting MPs
I'm sure the last Labour Government took a very dim view of Westminster MPs operating on a part-time basis, yet that is essentially what the former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is now doing - no matter how he or his office might dress things up.
No matter what comparisons are drawn with Tony Blair, or even his wife Cherie, the fact of the matter is that Tony Blair resigned his Westminster seat soon after leaving office - and is not drawing a public salary to subsidise his activities outside politics.
Gordon Brown may well have fallen out with his former protégés Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, if this article from the Times is correct, but that's no excuse for his part-time status as the 'right honourable' member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath.
Gordon Brown is on a global education crusade Times photographer, James Glossop
By Sam Coates
British statesmen are often more popular in America than they are at home, and the opportunity to dine with a former prime minister was expected to be the prize lot at a charity auction last month in a well-heeled suburb in Virginia. The successful bidder was offered the best seats at a speech in March where Gordon Brown is to be the guest of honour, join him for dessert and pose for a souvenir photograph. The package was valued at $2,000 (£1,225).
Angela Verdery, from Safe Harbor, the domestic violence charity in line to benefit, said: “Many auctions can end up looking the same, but this item was like, ‘Wow, look at that.’”
At another auction, tea with Tony Blair had gone for £20,000, so expectations of exceeding the guide price for a chance to meet Mr Brown were high. But a trip to Italy and a vacation in Vermont attracted more enthusiastic bidding. The evening raised $15,000 and the dinner date with Mr Brown went for a disappointing $350.
He has suffered greater indignities, but here was another example of the chastening reality of being what he once accidentally called an “ex-politician”, a remark made during an education summit in Qatar in October. The stumble was surprising, given that he remains an MP on £66,396 a year, but demonstrated an undeniable truth: in SW1, he is not the figure he once was.
Relations with Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, the political protégés who now shape the Labour Party, have fractured and, more than three years after Mr Brown lost the general election, there are regular questions in Westminster about his work and why he remains as an MP in the Commons.
“He feels like a pariah in Westminster,” one long-standing Scottish Labour friend said. “He knows he is unwelcome.”
They said that there is little chance of him going to the House of Lords, making him the third successive former prime minister in a row to shun the Upper Chamber.
Mr Brown’s office denied suggestions that he was not particularly keen on spending time in Westminster or that he had spoken to friends about the Lords.
Mr Brown continues to represent the people of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, and spends much of his time travelling.
An interview on a New York radio station in early October revealed how he now thinks of his job as an MP. Asked how he voted on military intervention in Syria, he admitted that he did not go through the division lobbies because he had better things to do.
“I was doing work on my global education,” he said. “I wasn’t in London ..... I have to concentrate now my efforts on where I can make the biggest impact. Rather than me trying to second guess President Obama or second guess the British Government, I prefer to say: ‘Look, you’ve still got this humanitarian disaster.’”
According to the Public Whip website, Mr Brown has voted on 13.1 per cent of occasions in this Parliament. Although low, this is actually an increase on the 12.7 per cent of times he voted between 2005 and 2010 as Chancellor and Prime Minister. Sir John Major managed a broadly comparable 20 per cent in the five years from 1997.
So if not in Westminster, where is Mr Brown? Much of the time he is at the family home in Fife, a Victorian house in the village of North Queensferry. This is where he writes, works on his global education project and the children go to school. Once Mr Brown was even spotted jogging.
Visitors to the home will testify that Mr Brown, unlike some other former prime ministers, is not pursuing a luxurious lifestyle, a noticable contrast with Mr Blair.
Arriving through the back of the house, one account suggested guests would see that the kitchen and one bathroom look modernised, while the rest of it remains as shabby as it was during his bachelor days. While some furniture is sympathetic to the age of the house, it is interspersed with jarring Ikea-style pieces. There are children’s toys and mess all over the place, one account claimed. His study has four or five computers, nestled among piles of paper.
Unlike Mr Blair’s sharp tailoring, Mr Brown’s dress sense remains erratic. He is said to shed his suits all over the house, leaving them in a heap, with the result that footprints once appeared on the back of a jacket. Marks were discovered on one suit only minutes before he left for a public appearance, causing momentary panic, according to a source.
Much of the time he is travelling. Mr Brown has ascended to that alternate universe of UN gatherings, World Economic Forum events, IMF conferences and a panoply of Middle East and Africa forums. This is where former prime ministers, presidents and David Miliband go after leaving elected office to break bread with billionaires and autocrats. It is a soulless existence of airport lounges, conference centres and business hotels.
Mr Brown’s golden ticket to this world is his role as UN Special Envoy for Global Education, which he was given in July 2012. He is said by friends to be happy there, although old rivalries seem to persist. “You can’t help feeling when you bump into the Office of Tony Blair or the Clinton Foundation, they’re in it for either their ego or the money,” one Brown veteran said.
The media rarely intrude into this haven because they are unwanted, deterred by the astronomical cost of gaining access and bored by the impenetrable language.
Mrs Brown’s decision last year to take a non-executive directorship on the Harrods Group board is one wrinkle in the “austerity Brown” portrait. The store, owned by a fund that the ruler of Qatar heads, has declined to say how much she is paid but confirms that she is working on marketing and corporate social responsibility for the business.
Accounts for 2011 show that an 11-person board was paid £2.8 million collectively. “Cherie would have given her right hand for that,” one friend said. Asked about this, his spokesman says Sarah Brown is a private citizen holding no public office.
She spends more time in London during the week than her husband, a friend said, but Mrs Brown now takes a more direct role in his work. “Sarah has become the guiding person in his professional life,” they said.
Indeed, some friends say that Mrs Brown is motivated in part by the way the Labour Party stood aside while coalition figures demolished her husband’s reputation after his 2010 defeat, and wants to repair the damage. Several credit her with linking him up with the Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by the Taleban. Malala visited Fife earlier this year.
There have been high-profile recruitments to help her side of the operation. Bruce Waddell,the former Daily Record editor, has joined A World At School, an initiative set up by Sarah Brown’s charity, PiggyBankKids, which Mr Brown spends much of his time on.
There are practical reasons why, whatever his intentions, Mr Brown would not have announced whether he was standing down as an MP. He made a commitment to his constituents immediately after losing the election. He is also boxed in by next September’s Scottish independence referendum. Leaving now would trigger a by-election, an unwelcome diversion in the months before the vote.
British statesmen are often more popular in America than they are at home, and the opportunity to dine with a former prime minister was expected to be the prize lot at a charity auction last month in a well-heeled suburb in Virginia. The successful bidder was offered the best seats at a speech in March where Gordon Brown is to be the guest of honour, join him for dessert and pose for a souvenir photograph. The package was valued at $2,000 (£1,225).
Angela Verdery, from Safe Harbor, the domestic violence charity in line to benefit, said: “Many auctions can end up looking the same, but this item was like, ‘Wow, look at that.’”
At another auction, tea with Tony Blair had gone for £20,000, so expectations of exceeding the guide price for a chance to meet Mr Brown were high. But a trip to Italy and a vacation in Vermont attracted more enthusiastic bidding. The evening raised $15,000 and the dinner date with Mr Brown went for a disappointing $350.
He has suffered greater indignities, but here was another example of the chastening reality of being what he once accidentally called an “ex-politician”, a remark made during an education summit in Qatar in October. The stumble was surprising, given that he remains an MP on £66,396 a year, but demonstrated an undeniable truth: in SW1, he is not the figure he once was.
Relations with Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, the political protégés who now shape the Labour Party, have fractured and, more than three years after Mr Brown lost the general election, there are regular questions in Westminster about his work and why he remains as an MP in the Commons.
“He feels like a pariah in Westminster,” one long-standing Scottish Labour friend said. “He knows he is unwelcome.”
They said that there is little chance of him going to the House of Lords, making him the third successive former prime minister in a row to shun the Upper Chamber.
Mr Brown’s office denied suggestions that he was not particularly keen on spending time in Westminster or that he had spoken to friends about the Lords.
Mr Brown continues to represent the people of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, and spends much of his time travelling.
An interview on a New York radio station in early October revealed how he now thinks of his job as an MP. Asked how he voted on military intervention in Syria, he admitted that he did not go through the division lobbies because he had better things to do.
“I was doing work on my global education,” he said. “I wasn’t in London ..... I have to concentrate now my efforts on where I can make the biggest impact. Rather than me trying to second guess President Obama or second guess the British Government, I prefer to say: ‘Look, you’ve still got this humanitarian disaster.’”
According to the Public Whip website, Mr Brown has voted on 13.1 per cent of occasions in this Parliament. Although low, this is actually an increase on the 12.7 per cent of times he voted between 2005 and 2010 as Chancellor and Prime Minister. Sir John Major managed a broadly comparable 20 per cent in the five years from 1997.
So if not in Westminster, where is Mr Brown? Much of the time he is at the family home in Fife, a Victorian house in the village of North Queensferry. This is where he writes, works on his global education project and the children go to school. Once Mr Brown was even spotted jogging.
Visitors to the home will testify that Mr Brown, unlike some other former prime ministers, is not pursuing a luxurious lifestyle, a noticable contrast with Mr Blair.
Arriving through the back of the house, one account suggested guests would see that the kitchen and one bathroom look modernised, while the rest of it remains as shabby as it was during his bachelor days. While some furniture is sympathetic to the age of the house, it is interspersed with jarring Ikea-style pieces. There are children’s toys and mess all over the place, one account claimed. His study has four or five computers, nestled among piles of paper.
Unlike Mr Blair’s sharp tailoring, Mr Brown’s dress sense remains erratic. He is said to shed his suits all over the house, leaving them in a heap, with the result that footprints once appeared on the back of a jacket. Marks were discovered on one suit only minutes before he left for a public appearance, causing momentary panic, according to a source.
Much of the time he is travelling. Mr Brown has ascended to that alternate universe of UN gatherings, World Economic Forum events, IMF conferences and a panoply of Middle East and Africa forums. This is where former prime ministers, presidents and David Miliband go after leaving elected office to break bread with billionaires and autocrats. It is a soulless existence of airport lounges, conference centres and business hotels.
Mr Brown’s golden ticket to this world is his role as UN Special Envoy for Global Education, which he was given in July 2012. He is said by friends to be happy there, although old rivalries seem to persist. “You can’t help feeling when you bump into the Office of Tony Blair or the Clinton Foundation, they’re in it for either their ego or the money,” one Brown veteran said.
The media rarely intrude into this haven because they are unwanted, deterred by the astronomical cost of gaining access and bored by the impenetrable language.
Mrs Brown’s decision last year to take a non-executive directorship on the Harrods Group board is one wrinkle in the “austerity Brown” portrait. The store, owned by a fund that the ruler of Qatar heads, has declined to say how much she is paid but confirms that she is working on marketing and corporate social responsibility for the business.
Accounts for 2011 show that an 11-person board was paid £2.8 million collectively. “Cherie would have given her right hand for that,” one friend said. Asked about this, his spokesman says Sarah Brown is a private citizen holding no public office.
She spends more time in London during the week than her husband, a friend said, but Mrs Brown now takes a more direct role in his work. “Sarah has become the guiding person in his professional life,” they said.
Indeed, some friends say that Mrs Brown is motivated in part by the way the Labour Party stood aside while coalition figures demolished her husband’s reputation after his 2010 defeat, and wants to repair the damage. Several credit her with linking him up with the Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by the Taleban. Malala visited Fife earlier this year.
There have been high-profile recruitments to help her side of the operation. Bruce Waddell,the former Daily Record editor, has joined A World At School, an initiative set up by Sarah Brown’s charity, PiggyBankKids, which Mr Brown spends much of his time on.
There are practical reasons why, whatever his intentions, Mr Brown would not have announced whether he was standing down as an MP. He made a commitment to his constituents immediately after losing the election. He is also boxed in by next September’s Scottish independence referendum. Leaving now would trigger a by-election, an unwelcome diversion in the months before the vote.
