D. Gordon Brown: There is life after No 10

In his first major interview since losing the election, the former Prime Minister tells Christina Patterson why he’s thriving as a constituency mp – and happily living without the trappings of power

Christina Patterson

The last time I saw Gordon Brown, he made me cry. It wasn’t just the way he stood, a Heathcliff battered, but not broken, a wounded warrior setting his face, one last time, against the glare of the cameras, and the gaze of the cackling hordes for whom he had been sport.

It wasn’t just the tribute to his family, and his staff, and to the soldiers whose hands he had shaken. It wasn’t just his assertion that he had learnt “much about the very best in human nature and a fair amount too about its frailties”, including, he was careful to add, his own. And it wasn’t just those scrumptious little boys. It was the whole damned caboodle, the whole tragedy of it, and dignity of it, and pity of it, and screaming, howling, frustration of it, that what had started so well had gone so badly wrong.

But that was on the telly, and this is what TV producers like to call “reality” on a wind-swept July morning in Fife. In spite of widespread rumours that Gordon Brown has been abducted by aliens (or absent from London, which amounts to the same thing), or perhaps to counter them, I have been invited to spend a day in his constituency, shadowing him. I am excited. I am terrified. I don’t know how you talk to mad, bad mafiosi. I don’t know how you get them to open up, particularly when you’ve been told that they will only talk about their work in Fife. About which, it has to be said, you don’t know very much.

But here’s the car and here, leaping out of it, is the man. If he has spent the past two and a half months brooding in an attic, there isn’t much sign of it. Gordon Brown looks healthy and fit. When he bounds over and shakes my hand, he also seems quite cheerful.

We’re at Fife Energy Park in Methil for a meeting with the MD of Burntisland Fabrications. It isn’t strictly speaking in Brown’s constituency, but Burntisland, where its other factory is. I passed through it on the train up, an almost parodically industrial vista of factory chimneys and red brick blocks, set against a background of driving rain and sea.

We march down a long corridor, running alongside a Tate Modern-sized space enclosing a giant pipe. At a meeting table dotted with cups of coffee and plates of biscuits (which nobody touches) Brown grills the MD on the company’s current activities, the number of “jackets” (sub-structures for the wind turbines) that it's producing and the number of apprentices it's taking on. I can’t keep my eyes off Brown’s face. It’s like a map of a man’s soul, a collage of storms and sorrow and steel. “For the benefit of Christina,” he says, jolting me out of my fantasies of fly-on-the-wall invisibility, “Britain is now the biggest producer of offshore wind”. I believe it. Leaving London in 28 degrees, I’d thought a summer frock would be just the ticket. Ever since I arrived, my fingers have been blue.

Perhaps sensing that the industrial history of Fife wouldn't be my special subject at Mastermind, Brown fills in some of the gaps. There used, he tells me, to be 66 mines, employing 33,000 people. But now mining has died. “Fife’s history,” he says, “has been trying to create new jobs in new areas every 30 years.” Apart from the dockyard and the naval base, and the lino industry which was once huge and has now dwindled to almost nothing, jobs in manufacturing are now few and far between. “What’s great about this project,” he says, and he looks as though he means it, “is that it’s about tackling climate change, creating new sources of energy, reducing our dependence on oil and creating new jobs.”

It’s time for us to get “booted up.” “I bet you didn’t think you’d be doing this,” says Brown chummily, as I swap my dainty black pumps for chunky builders’ boots and stuff my hair into a yellow plastic helmet.

Back in our normal shoes, and without our helmets, we set off in different cars to the next stop. It’s the Council for Voluntary Services in Buckhaven, a tatty building on a run-down parade.

The Independent, July 26, 2010

Task 12. What do the word combinations in bold type mean? What lexical groups do they relate to?

Task 13. Answer the following questions.

1. Where is the introduction of the article?

2. What does the sentence The last time I saw Gordon Brown, he made me cry imply?

3. Why do all the sentences that go after this phrase in the first and second passages begin with introductory It / And it ?

4. Why do four sentences in the third paragraph begin with the pronoun I ?

5. Does the journalist stick to this style of writing further on? Why?

6. What is your impression of the story? How is this effect achieved?

Task 14. Watch Video 6.1 (Folder Unit 5), featuring press review, and get its overall idea.

You might need to know the word combinations in the box to have a better idea of the talk.

to spend a day with sb up in the constituency domestic politics

fascinating to be up somewhere

to put on sth just for show to be in the mood

not to let slip anything (at all) not to be brooding

to enjoy life up there to be blunt with sb

to be peppered throughout the interview trappings of power

Task 15. Watch Video 6.1 again and highlight its idea with the pattern Who? – What? – When? – Where? (find more than one answer) – Why? – How?

What is the general attitude of the journalist to the article in question?

Task 16. Watch another fragment of the press review talk (Video 6.2, Folder Unit 5), and try to find answers to the following questions.

1. How many papers are being reviewed?

2. How many issues are being raised? Some issues fall into several smaller problems. What are they? Fill in the grid below to report them.

Issue	1	2	3	…
Problem

Task 17. Watch Video 6.2 again and try to catch several colloquial words in Kelvin Mackenzie’s talk. What words does the journalist drop out while talking? Comment on his play with the word band.