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David Aaronovitch

Times columnist

It was the longest understudy, for one of the shortest performances. A decade of increasingly unquiet waiting for his moment to take over from Tony Blair was followed by just under three years in the long-coveted post. Departing No 10, Gordon Brown left behind a reputation for grumpiness, intellectual brilliance, ambition and, in the end, enduring personal tragedy.

The grey, jowly, plodding figure who left office was scarcely recognisable as the brilliant, Heathcliffian man who entered the Treasury in 1997. In opposition, Mr Brown had shredded his opponents with thunder and wit, which turned to lightning and cleverness early in new Labour’s first term. In the first week of that term he announced the independence of the Bank of England, a reform that was to become accepted by his political rivals, but which was not even put to the Cabinet.

His most deployed political term in the first two years of the Labour Government was the legendary “prudence”, who was invariably accompanied by “with a purpose”. He knew exactly what he was doing; he was the great intellectual of modern politics. His supporters told anyone who would listen that he was the real brains behind new Labour. He was literally unassailable.

When writers use terms such as “paradox”, “enigma” and “contradiction” it is often a sign that they simply do not understand the subject. Gordon Brown has had these words applied to him more often than any other modern British politician. It has been hard, throughout his career in government, to explain how his different characteristics coexisted within the same person.

Mr Brown was, famously, the “son of the manse” – a man built upon the bedrock of religious and social principles as bequeathed to him by his minister father. “Understand this about him,” I was told more than once by Scots, “and you understand everything.” And when he repeatedly used the word “values”, like a mallet on a wooden tent-peg and pronounced with an almost unending first vowel, it sounded convincing and deeply meant.

In his international campaigns to reduce Third World debt and to increase aid to Africa, both hugely successful, it was easy to see high moral principle at work, although such goods are indeed oft interred with the politician’s bones. These were real and important achievements, but ones unlikely to be appreciated by most journalists, let alone most voters.

It could also be that in 30 years the first historians of the 2000s will single out Gordon Brown’s leadership during the banking crisis of 2008-09 as having been central to saving the world from a second full-scale Great Depression. For a year a formerly depressed Prime Minister was transformed into a man full of hectic energy and knowledgeable determination.

But then there was the thin-skinned, jealous, tricksy and occasionally even treacherous Brown, who seemed to stand at 90 degrees to the morals of the manse. This was the Chancellor who would cook the figures to make them more palatable and to suggest that he was being more generous than in fact he was; the colleague who allowed his closest advisers to run around Westminster bad-mouthing anyone who was considered to be an opponent; the Cabinet member who tried to keep his budgets secret from his own Prime Minister; the co-founder of new Labour who, for half a decade, connived secretly at the replacement of his one-time friend.

When, in the late Nineties, the first reports began to be written about rival camps forming around Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, some of us dismissed them as overblown – the product of junior aides shooting their mouths off and hacks anxious for a story. It seemed intrinsically unlikely that men who had been so disciplined and thoughtful in their pursuit of government should be so adolescent in their relationships with each other. I could not have been more wrong and gradually it became clear that this was not a matter of six of one and half a dozen of the other, but of a jealousy and resentment felt by Mr Brown towards Mr Blair.

So Gordon Brown became the man who opposed Tony Blair’s attempts at public service reform when the latter was in office, and then embraced the same reforms once he had been pushed out.

And then, when in the post he had wanted so long, elected from a field of one, the politician who had moved decisively in 1997 on the question of the Bank of England, havered disastrously when, for a moment almost exactly ten years later, he might have won a general election in his own right.

In the televised debates in the 2010 campaign the former romantic lead came over as a rather querulous and awkward pensioner, barely restraining his innate grumpiness. Perhaps most ruinous to his long-term reputation, though, was the perception, widely shared and cleverly exploited by political opponents, that the economic crisis was somehow his fault, almost alone. The accusation was that Britain was particularly disadvantaged in responding to the crisis because of his earlier profligacy, saddling the nation with a mountain of public debt. When the Cameron-Clegg coalition began its governance of the country its main theme was blaming Mr Brown and his high-spending ways for any unpopular decision that it was about to make.

It might also be that Mr Brown is the last British leader in the modern era to be nothing like a television or film celebrity. His predecessor and his successor both possessed an easy public charm and a capacity to share their private existences in some way with the public and the media. Mr Brown palpably loathed this aspect of 21st-century politics, taking care to minimise the significant disability represented by his damaged eyesight, to play down the trauma of the loss of his first child in 2002, and to guard the privacy of his two young sons who, for one moment only, shared his last public appearance outside 10 Downing Street.

Gordon Brown was a substantial politician, a man of substantial achievement and significant faults, probably in the end too cautious, too thin-skinned and too cussedly human to be a great leader.