Brown stands down

10 years ago, when we were living in Japan, I remember a telling incident concerning Gordon Brown. There was a G8 conference in Okinawa and both Blair and Brown were attending. Their relationship was, as we all know, strained. They even flew in separately. It was the job of our Ambassador, Stephen Gomersall to meet them at the airport and take them to the hotel. In the car, the conversation with Blair was continuous, lively and wide-ranging, lots of eye contact, questions about family etc. With Brown it was slow, almost perfunctory and all the wrong body language. (By the way, I wasn’t there, sitting in the passenger seat – I got this from the ambo). Maybe he was jetlagged. But it sums up the difference between the two. Poor old Brown: some people are good at that kind of thing, some aren’t. But as PM you have to be good at that kind of thing.