Gordon Brown wants us to believe he would have created a socialist paradise – had Tony and the universe not conspired to stop him

We should resist his claim that he was a true progressive conscience trapped in a New Labour government

Brown's government was not more 'progressive' than Blair's, so why did he spent 12 years undermining his colleague? (Getty)

“I wanted office not for the title but for the power to move forward progressive goals for the country.” With one sentence Gordon Brown tries to explain his 12-year campaign to undermine Tony Blair. Yet when Brown eventually became Prime Minister there was nothing notably more progressive about his government.

Brown’s memoir, My Life, Our Times, published this week, re-opens all the old disputes of the New Labour period. The Granita deal still rankles – the agreement formalised in an Islington restaurant in 1994 by which Brown stood aside and backed Blair for the Labour leadership. Brown says Blair promised to stand down in his favour if they won a second term. Blair says it wasn’t a promise he should have made and anyway it was conditional on Brown’s co-operation.

Brown says Blair guaranteed him control of economic and social policy, a claim gently mocked by Peter Mandelson, the “third man” in that difficult relationship, in his review of Brown’s book, saying that this presumably meant “leaving Blair to make the tea and fight the occasional war”.

Brown says the promise was repeated once they had won a second term, this time on condition that Brown would support joining the euro. Blair denied it on the Today programme on Saturday morning.

Brown claims credit for keeping us out of the euro, and Blair certainly became keener on it, but Labour had promised a referendum on the matter, and there was never any prospect that the people would vote for it. Fourteen years later, after all, they voted to leave the EU altogether.

There were differences between them, and one of Brown’s policies was certainly egalitarian, if that is what he means by “progressive”. Working tax credits were important in lifting the incomes of the working poor – and in protecting them from the effects of the financial crisis. Blair didn’t like them, and felt Brown had concealed their true cost, but they were allowed to go ahead.

So there was no need for Brown to behave the way he did. I have also been reading Alastair Campbell’s diaries of 2005-07, when Brown used the allegations about loans for peerages to try to push Blair out in 2006. “You’ve done far worse to me,” he said, when Blair protested.

Brown’s book says almost nothing about this period, when his lieutenants finally launched their coup to force Blair to put a 12-month limit on his time in office, except to claim: “I helped to put the rebellion down.” The reader is forgiven for expressing deep scepticism at this point.

On the other hand, Brown has his human side. The account of the death of his daughter Jennifer at 10 days old in 2002 is heartbreaking. Badly as he behaved towards others in the New Labour team, it is hard to be too critical of someone who could not listen to music for more than a year after the death of his child.

And Brown did help to save the world. He wasn’t the only world leader who did the right things, nationalising the banks and pumping money into the economy, but his judgement and experience counted. Even George Osborne – who opposed those policies at the time as Shadow Chancellor – admitted last month that “broadly speaking the government did what was necessary in a very difficult situation”. It was such a surprising thing to say that even another of Brown’s longstanding opponents, Jeremy Corbyn, quoted it in Prime Minister’s Questions.

Does any of this matter any more? I think it does. Brown led to Corbyn in a kind of apostolic ratchet. Brown’s covert backing of Ed Miliband for the leadership in 2010 was probably motivated by his hostility to Blair’s preferred candidate, David Miliband. And Ed Miliband led to Corbyn, not just by changing the party rules but by reinforcing Brown’s message that being left wing, or “progressive”, meant repudiating New Labour.

For me, the problem with Corbyn is not that he is unelectable but that he is wrong. On that, the Blair-Brown argument goes on. Brown said this week that Corbyn had succeeded because “he expresses people’s anger” about globalisation and inequality. Yes, but he doesn’t have the answers, said Blair in a rival interview on the Today programme.

Naturally, I am with Blair on this. Britain is far too unequal. You can argue that New Labour didn’t do enough about it. Overall, the level of inequality hardly changed in the Blair-Brown years. But if you want to close the gap between rich and poor, nationalisation and abolishing tuition fees are the wrong policies. Indeed, abolishing tuition fees would make inequality worse because it would be a big subsidy to the better-off.

That said, electability matters too. You cannot “move forward progressive goals” unless you win, which is something neither Brown nor Corbyn has done. As Blair said this morning, “Come on guys, we should be 15, 20 points ahead at this stage.”

Grateful as we should be to Brown for saving the world, and sympathetic as we should be to his tribulations, we should resist his claim that he was a true progressive conscience trapped in a New Labour government – a hero who, had Tony and the universe not conspired against him, could have delivered a popular socialist paradise.