When Keir Starmer needed advice about clinging to power in Downing Street, there was only one person to call. Gordon Brown knows all about hiding behind the net curtains of No. 10 as electoral reality sets in. As Labour fell to a historic defeat at the local elections, the Prime Minister decided that what voters wanted was a special envoy on global finance – and that a Labour prime minister who never won an election was the man for the job.

Brown has been keeping himself busy doing what he does best: settling scores

Brown has been keeping himself busy doing what he does best: settling scores

The appointment is the latest act in Gordon Brown’s rather happy post-prime ministerial life. Brown has been keeping himself busy doing what he does best: settling scores. Every now and then, his great clunking fist descends from the clouds to take someone out. In recent months, his targets have been dead (Jeffrey Epstein) or dying on their feet (Andrew Mountbatten Windsor; Peter Mandelson). But there’s only so much satisfaction to be gained from punching down. Brown wants to be remembered as the left’s John Major; a Grown-up Elder Statesman who, in that famous slip of the tongue of his at PMQs, ‘saved the world’. His return to Downing Street won’t save Starmer, of course, but it’s just the tonic for Gordon.

The trouble is that Brown’s attempt to rehabilitate himself is hard to swallow. At best, his years in Downing Street were a wasted opportunity, spent fighting his boss Tony Blair for the keys to No. 10 only to squander the opportunity when it finally came; at worst, the decisions he took set Britain up for failure and are a key reason why we’re in such a mess.

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One of Britain’s biggest problems today is its ballooning welfare bill, which will reach £63 billion by 2028. Millions of people are stuck in a welfare trap, condemned to live off a state that can barely afford to sustain them. The Tories must shoulder some of the blame for failing to address this crisis, but there is no doubt that Brown was the architect of welfare Britain as we know it today. Frank Field was right when he said that ‘it was Gordon Brown’s unthinkable expansion of the tax........

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