The Tragedy of Gordon Brown

As President Bush wraps up his farewell tour of Europe, I wonder: Does he ever take comfort in the misfortune of others? Schadenfreude surly beckons in London. Bush's approval rating is the lowest since polls began measuring this yardstick. Britain's prime minister, Gordon Brown, is in the same deep hole.

Whether history will judge Bush a tragic figure—a man unprepared for office who, confronted with awesome complexities, sought refuge in simplicities—is unclear. But Brown already seems to meet the classic definition: a man of great ability brought low by his failings. More broadly, Brown embodies the abiding tragedy of the Number Two. That should resonate here in the U.S., as John McCain and Barack Obama seek their vice-presidential candidates.

When Brown took over from Tony Blair a year ago June 27th, he was greeted with relief. Blair had become a figure of contempt in England-a phenomenon which puzzled outsiders. He was condemned for being too close to Bush; the alliance which propelled Britain into the Iraq war was as unpopular in England as it was in America. And Blair had come to be seen as a blow-hard, strutting the world's stage while, it was alleged, ignoring problems back home. To much of the rest of the world, though, he was a leader of welcome stature.

Brown's elevation to succeed Blair was greeted with optimism. For Labour Party stalwarts—always uncomfortable with Blair's briskly un-ideological "New Labour"—Brown was seen as the dour prophet who would reassert old verities. For the nation at large, Brown offered a fresh start for a government grown tired but still, on balance, viewed as better than its alternatives.

Brown's collapse in the intervening year has been astonishing. The Conservative Party—in opposition in the British Parliament since 1997—now rides high in the polls. Labour was massacred in local elections. Most notably in London itself, where the incumbent mayor Ken Livingstone—a tactless but undeniably competent exemplar of Old Labour—was tossed out in favor of an agreeable flaneur, Boris Johnson, whose wit and off-hand charm didn't conceal an absence of discernible qualifications to run a great city. Elsewhere in the country, Labour has been thrown out of Parliamentary seats it had held for decades.

Under the flexible mandate of the British system, Brown must submit himself to a national election sometime before May 2010. The Conservative Party looks set for a victory sweeping enough to give it a majority in the House of Commons for at least a decade.

And Brown doesn't seem to know what to do. "A dead man walking", one commentator cruelly called him. His colleagues in the Cabinet—British government being a more collective institution than the American presidency-are mulling, ever more openly, the need to depose him before the impending tsunami overwhelms them all. Brown himself stabs at ill-conceived pieces of legislation that are no sooner proposed than re-thought. A botched tax "reform" is widely thought to have cost Labour two seats in recent by-elections, as mid-term contests in individual political districts are called. Only this past week, Brown staked his dwindling power on pushing through Parliament tougher anti-terrorist legislation that even the police, the lawyers and the Security Service said was unnecessary. The baffled judgement is that Brown thought it necessary to show he was tough. Meanwhile, really thorny issues-such as the gaping hole in Britain's defense budget between future-year commitments and funding—remain unresolved.