Best for Britain?

The politics and legacy of Gordon Brown

Simon Lee, Oneworld, 307 pages, hardback, £16.99

This biography by Simon Lee, senior lecturer in politics at Hull University, gives a mixed assessment of prime minister Gordon Brown’s politics over the past 10 years and goes on to assess his first few weeks as prime minister.

Published before the election that never was, the book evaluates Brown on a range of criteria from Iraq, climate change, and fiscal policy to the Anglo-American relationship, and asks how he will reinvigorate a government in its third term.

The book is particularly critical of how the constitution can have a prime minister in charge of health and education in England yet not in his own Scottish constituency. Lee argues that English MPs are denied the autonomous politics that devolution has extended to other parts of the UK.

Lee also looks back to Brown’s early career and describes the ideological shift he has made noting, that he started out as an impassioned socialist but turned into a pragmatic liberal.