What are the qualities demanded of a leader? Wisdom? Integrity? Experience? Perhaps. But what really counts may be pubbability — an elusive X factor that makes voters want to share a pint with a politician. And on that front, Gordon Brown — the 56-year-old Scot who is expected to replace Tony Blair as Britain's Prime Minister this summer — has a problem.
"Gordon was the last Cabinet colleague you'd have thought of suggesting a drink with," says Baroness Morris of Yardley, who worked alongside Brown when she was Secretary of State for Education and Skills. Bob Geldof, the musician and Live Aid activist, developed a close relationship with Brown while lobbying him on Africa. Yet he, too, sees limits to their camaraderie. "Would it be easy to spend a night in a bar with him?" asks Geldof. "No, he'd get bored. Not with you, but with that chitchat level." Even Brown's inner circle frets about the friendliness-factor issue. One loyal disciple concedes: "It's important that people want to have a beer with Gordon."
What makes this fixation all the more striking is that Brown is, in so many other ways, such a formidable figure. His more statesmanlike qualities were richly evident last week when he arrived at the European Commission's headquarters in Brussels, sprang out of his limousine and led his retinue into a conference where he argued, with urgency and conviction, for extending the chance of education to every child in the world. Brown's face is already familiar in Brussels. As Tony Blair's Chancellor of the Exchequer, he has represented the U.K. in international financial negotiations for a decade. Back home, he has played a pivotal role in securing Labour's three consecutive electoral victories. His achievements — freeing the Bank of England to set interest rates; masterminding a clever strategy that avoided committing Britain to a speedy adoption of the euro; an impressive record of steady growth, low inflation and high employment — are so anchored in British life that they go almost unremarked. For all that, Britons seem surprisingly uncertain what manner of man it is who should soon move from 11 to 10 Downing Street. It's the kind of question that stumps the man himself.
Taciturn and quicker of thought than speech, he's more interested in weighty ideas than personalities and clearly finds it puzzling that anyone should expect the softer reaches of his character to yield clues to his political landscape. He's analytical but not self-aware, sometimes so absorbed in big, important musings that he fails to straighten his tie or untuck his trouser legs from his socks or recognize his colleagues. At Labour's annual conference last fall, the premier-in-waiting made awkward progress around a reception organized by the party and full of potential donors, thrusting a large hand at unfamiliar guests and deploying a lame icebreaker about the conference venue in the industrial capital of northwest England. "Gordon Brown," he boomed at each encounter. "What do you think of Manchester?" One of his interlocutors, a party stalwart who has worked with Brown since before Labour swept to power in 1997, quietly reminded him that they were long-standing colleagues. His tousled host shook his mighty head like a bull that had just been pricked by an impudent picador. "Oh," he said, still evidently none the wiser. "Anyway, what do you think of Manchester?"
The burning question for Brown is what Manchester thinks of him. Brown will take power at a time when the country has tired of the hugely successful New Labour project he helped create. He faces a resurgent Conservative Party, led by David Cameron, now remaking the Tories in his own, personable image and aiming to capture support in traditional Labour heartlands like Manchester. At the beginning of May, as Labour marked a decade in office, voters turfed out scores of the party's representatives at polls in English municipalities and for the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly. The Tories won an average of around 40% of votes in England, compared with Labour's 27%. They didn't make the hoped-for inroads in Manchester, but a similar margin could still be enough to unseat the government at national elections, due by spring 2010.