Simon Carr: After a decade in office, the striking thing is how little Brown has changed

Thursday, 22 March 2007

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At the height of his agitation, five or six years ago, Gordon Brown's psychological flaws were there for all to see.

In Treasury select committee he reacted in ways that would have had a lesser man sectioned. All questions, whether friendly or hostile, would be answered in the same way. Often before the question was finished he'd open his mouth and release a data-stream of statistics, tax rates, comparisons, dates, proportions, percentages, age ranges and departmental chaff so far removed from the question you could only assume he was hiding something. Or even everything. On and on his answers went, unpunctuated by wit, humour, light, shade, or indeed punctuation. For the first few times it was extremely funny.

That's not meant as a satirical point. His refusal to recognise the right of his questioners to exist was something clinicians recognised. But ah, people said, if only you could see him in private. How charming he was, how funny. If only the world could see that Gordon Brown. Indeed, we got a glimpse of it when he spoke about Donald Dewar after his death. When talking personally he did indeed have the power to engage us in his private drama. But as a public speaker, as an interviewee he was and is unpleasantly self-obsessed.

He's asked what effect the price of oil would have on the quarter's inflation estimates - a useful and interesting question. He hears the word "oil" and says what he wants to about that. Starting with the central Asian pipeline. It is this solipsism that causes listeners and viewers to reach for the remote. It is very alienating. If it's all about Gordon why would other people want to be involved?

His conference speeches are interesting because they are unmemorable. They have many virtues, his apologists will number them off, but they are rightly regarded as very, very boring. It is the first fact of analysis that Gordon's speeches are dull. And too long at half the length. They proceed loudly with no change of pace or tone. They have the same structure. They have no real rhetorical skill - in fact the text, when you read it, looks like the brief for a speech. "Yes, that's what I want to say," he might think, "Now how do I go about saying it?"

But the most important fact is this: they haven't changed in a decade. This is very important. Blair's speeches are different every year, and he is very different from what he was seven years ago. No more verblessness now. One-word paragraphs? Out. Bambi's delicate feeling out of the ground ahead - all gone. Blair has mutated at a rate that survival demands. His entire rhetorical apparatus has changed, and the world of political discourse has changed with it (which gives force and truth to Cameron's jibes against the "analogue Chancellor in a digital world").

Gordon's speeches still follow the template that was the fashion in the 1960s, possibly the 1860s. Start with "humour", that important thing, "to get people on your side". Then settle down to the serious stuff, that everyone has really come to hear. This consists of a series of confident assertions of superiority over the enemy (alien beings, exercising every sort of vice). And then, into the peroration, a crescendo of faith, hope and sunlight leading to a climax of orgiastic unity. An iPod is useful, I've found, to take the edge off the pain; it's like gas for mothers, during their labour.

The ability to engage with his audience is what will make or break Brown at the next election. And his only mentor in this can be Blair. Blair's big conference speeches invariably surprise. That is their first quality. By some trick of theatre, or presence, or humour or presentation, Blair gets inside the confidence of his (usually hostile) audience. It's like watching an expert car thief getting into a locked car as quickly as the owner with a key.

How can Brown change without seeming to made over by rhetorical cosmeticians?

Blair's personal style is a search for the best consensus he can make on his own terms. Thus his reaction to a hostile question is: "Where I agree with you is this." This instinct has mutated in the aftermath of Iraq: "There are those who disagree with me and I don't disrespect them for that," he is inclined to say. It's one of his attractive traits. His speeches, likewise, assume the presence of an intelligent interlocutor who disagrees with what is being said, and with whom Blair argues. You can sense the respect by the fact that the interlocutor isn't presented as ridiculous or vicious. Why would he alienate half of the voting population?

Gordon Brown's speeches reveal a very different internal process. There is no real interlocutor in his speeches. His view of the enemy (he views the Tories as enemies) reduces them to caricatures motivated by malice, cruelty and greed. No reasonable person would characterise half of the British electorate in those terms. But then, everything in the speech is Gordon: every portrait is a self portrait.

Yes, this sort of speech-making seems to be the direct result of his personal relations in professional life. Successful, argumentative, engaging speeches need more than one hand. They are a collaboration. They require that the speechmaker has the substance to hear his work criticised and chopped about. To have his ideas challenged and to accept the validity of other points of view. This is not the way the Chancellor operates, if recent reports be true. It is, as they say in the Civil Service, "outwith his grasp".

Judging by his evolutionary capabilities in the past year (British flags in front garden!) he does not mutate easily; and by the time he's caught up with this idea, it'll be time for something else.

A decade of buzzwords: the Chancellor year by year

1997

Ended dividend tax credits for pension funds. Domestic fuel rate cut to 5%; vehicle fuel "es-calator" raised.

Speech: 61 mins

Buzzwords: Challenge (8) Poverty (5)

1998

Working Families Tax Credit brought in. Married couples' allowance cut to 10%. ISAs introduced.

Speech: 62 mins

Buzzwords: Support (20) Reform (17)

1999

Basic rate of income tax cut from 23% to 22%; Stamp duty raised.Married couples' allowance stops.

Speech: 67 mins