Dear All, Please take a break from ICTs and read the Wall Sreet Journal article below on Gordon Brown. So Who's This Gordon Brown Anyway? By Quentin Letts 877 words 28 June 2007 The Wall Street Journal A13 English (Copyright (c) 2007, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.) London -- On Wednesday, we in Britain received a new prime minister. About an hour after Tony Blair formally resigned his post to Queen Elizabeth II, the Right Honourable James Gordon Brown arrived at Buckingham Palace, kissed the Queen's hand and was invited to form a new government. That is how we often do things here when we want to change the head of government. There need not be a general election. Nor a coup. Just a post-prandial trip to the palace by, in this instance, a bookish, burly Scotsman who has ached and plotted and toiled and seethed to become Prime Minister since he was first elected to Westminster's House of Commons in 1983. Now, at last, his hour has come. When John Major succeeded Margaret Thatcher, so little was known about the new PM that foreign diplomats struggled to form much of a view about his politics. Those initial dispatches from London embassies back to capital cities contained a fair deal of padding and bluster. With Gordon Brown there need be no such scratching around for intelligence. The methodical Mr. Brown, a subtle but unrelenting redistributionist, has been Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer since 1997. His wide-ranging policies are there for anyone patient enough to study them. He believes in stealthy (i.e., hidden) taxes, a big state and exceedingly complex schemes to help "the puir," as he pronounces "the poor." But what sort of character is this Brown? As the political salonistes of Washington, D.C. lick their pencils and hover over the B section of their address books, what of the inner Brown? Is he convivial? Is he one of life's thigh slappers? Or is he, well, hard work? One to stick next to Henry Kissinger at dinner? Or one for the splashier, Harry-and-Tina-end of the table? Unusual for a successful modern politician, Gordon Brown is not a particularly good actor -- bad at fake smiles, yet to perfect that look of plastic delight which can be flashed in an instant, normally when a camera is nearby. If he is having a bad time, big Gordon has a job disguising it. His purple lips start to pout. He begins to pull at his dark pepper-and-salt fringe, or at least he did until he recently had it shampooed and trimmed. He has a maddening habit of looking at the floor. Gordon Brown will be the first British prime minister since Clement Attlee (who beat Churchill in 1945) not to know how to drive a motor car. In part this is because he lost the sight of his left eye in a sporting injury at school. In part, though, his inability to drive reflects a wider nonchalance about fripperies, as he would consider them. Call it unworldly if you like, but Gordon Brown is not much interested in clothes or food or in his own wealth. Just as Linus in Peanuts draws strength from his security blanket, so Mr. Brown never feels entirely rooted unless he is surrounded by mounds of hand-scrawled briefing notes. These sheets of A4 tend to bear color-coded sticky labels and are carried about Westminster by his acolytes. If they ever encountered a tornado, the air above London would be thick for days with slow-settling sheets of notation scrawled in an almost illegible black hand. He is a poor time keeper. Tidiness has never been a forte although the crumpled shirts and shiny suit trousers improved after his comparatively late marriage. His wife Sarah has battled to get him to wear neckties in any color other than red. He has relented to the extent of sometimes wearing a blue tie. He and Sarah lost their first child and bore their bereavement with great stoicism. Their third, born last year, has cystic fibrosis. Gordon Brown is very different from the socially fluent Tony Blair. In private he can be charming -- and in private a wide smile comes easily -- but in public he is a bundle of anxiety who thinks he must crush all resistance. His jaw juts when he speaks and he has a smallish repertoire of jokes. At a lectern he does not swagger or casually survey the throng. He pats his script repeatedly with two hands the fingernails of which are bitten to bleeding remnants. Not even the most skilled Manhattan manicurist could salvage those nails. This does not, I hope, make Gordon Brown sound dull or timid. He is a more intellectual man than the sometimes broad-brush Blair. A sometime journalist, he is alive to gossip. He can also be astoundingly determined. A clergyman's son, he can drop spiritual language into political remarks without sounding arch. He is enigmatic, secretive, cautious, brooding, and before marriage he was considered a great catch for glamorous women. Prime Minister Brown may not prove quite as unquestioning an ally of the current White House. He is, however, an intriguing customer, as America may soon discover now that the Queen's hands have been brushed by those pouty, purple lips. ---------------------------------------------- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by Jambo MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. --------------------------------------------- "easy access to the world"