Buy One, Get One Free

Britain’s political parties are collaborating in a mild deception. They pretend that voters are being asked to make a choice between Conservative leader Michael Howard and Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair. But this is not quite what is on offer. The allegiance of Labour M.P.s and party supporters is even now being transferred to the politician who is a near-certainty to succeed Blair as leader and Prime Minister, should Labour win this week as expected: Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. Blair precipitated these defections last September, when he said he would step down after this election and before a subsequent one. This week’s vote is therefore as much a choice between Howard and Brown as it is between Howard and Blair. The subliminal message of Labour’s campaign is: Vote Blair, Get Brown.

The truth can be seen in Brown’s demeanor: he exudes good humour in place of the glowering introspection that has characterized him for years. He is confident that Labour members will credit any victory to him because he has rallied to the cause at a time when his stock is high and Blair’s is low. He’s also managed to suppress the animosity he’s felt toward Blair since the Prime Minister went back on his promise, made during the height of his unpopularity over the war in Iraq, to stand down before this election. It’s a world away from the way they were. Such was the intimacy of their friendship in Labour’s early years of government that Blair and Brown banned staff from their meetings, to the despair of civil servants. There was a danger for Blair and Brown, though, since the two men didn’t always agree about what had been decided during their tête-à-tête.

What kind of Prime Minister would Brown be? He and Blair have very different personalities and increasingly different political views. In private, Brown is stimulating and engaging. He reads voraciously and fizzes with ideas, though his jokes improve neither with age nor repetition. His public performances, however, reinforce his reputation for inflexibility and remoteness. He tends to focus on one issue at a time, worrying away at it while delegating day-to-day problems to his closest aides. This modus operandi will not be so effective if he becomes Prime Minister. Brown will have to learn to be more responsive to external pressures and less reliant on a small circle of allies.

Internationally, he admires the United States — it’s long been his holiday destination of choice — and the dynamism of its economy, and he wouldn’t want to sour Anglo-American relations by being conspicuously aloof from President Bush. (He did not harm his relationship with the White House last week by voicing his support for Blair’s decision to go to war.) Still, it’s inconceivable that he could be as close to Bush as Blair has been. Brown would find it hard to disguise his annoyance at U.S. reluctance to back initiatives on climate change and debt cancellation for the developing world. When it comes to the European Union, Brown is something of a paradox. In private, his language is pro-European, but he likes the largely Euro-skeptic British media to portray him as one of their own. When negotiating with European counterparts, his approach is Thatcherite: bang the table and insist Britain gets its way.

Serving the Labour party has been a lifelong vocation for Brown. He retains a Presbyterian conviction in the redemptive power of work and an obsession with abolishing unemployment. He also fervently embraces Labour’s historic commitment to reducing inequality — though he has gone about it in subtler ways than increasing income tax. This contrasts with Blair, who is more interested in making everyone wealthier than in narrowing the gap between the wealthy and the less well off. Brown has more confidence than Blair in the ability of the public sector to deliver a first-class service. He is not, however, an old-style tax-and-spend socialist. He recognizes that nothing is possible without a thriving economy, and is terrified that businesses and wealth-creating individuals might be driven offshore by high taxes.

Although on Iraq he has now given Blair unqualified public support, his private view is that the process of making the decision to go to war was insufficiently transparent and rigorous. Which is why he would want to overhaul and codify much of the British constitution to prevent such allegedly slipshod decision-making from being repeated. It’s all about rebuilding trust, which is vital if Brown is to win the election that really matters to him — which is not this week’s vote, but the one after.