Gordon Brown
Gordon Brown was prime minister of the United Kingdom from June 2007 to May 2010, the chancellor of ten years who had waited for Blair to go under an agreement the two disputed, who took the office without a contest, did not call the election he could have won in the autumn of 2007, and then, when Lehman Brothers fell in September 2008, recapitalised the British banks with fifty billion pounds of public money in a plan the Americans and Europeans copied within days, chaired the London G20 of April 2009 that put a trillion dollars into the world economy, and was said by Krugman to have saved the world financial system, which did not save him from the election of 2010. That was lost after a microphone caught him calling a voter a bigoted woman. He was born in Giffnock in 1951, the son of a Church of Scotland minister, went to Edinburgh University at sixteen, lost the sight of one eye to a rugby injury and nearly the other, took a doctorate on the Labour party in the 1920s, and entered parliament in 1983 sharing an office with Blair. As chancellor from 1997 he gave the Bank of England its independence in his first week, kept the pound out of the euro by five tests he had written to fail, paid for the health service and the schools with the growth of the long boom, invented the tax credits, and abolished the ten-pence tax rate in his last budget, which came back to hurt him. The premiership was the crash. Northern Rock was nationalised in February 2008, and in October the government took stakes in RBS, Lloyds and HBOS on the condition they lent, and the deficit went to eleven per cent of output. The recession was the deepest since the 1930s and the recovery had begun by the election. The expenses scandal of 2009 destroyed the parliament's standing, his own cabinet tried twice to remove him. The campaign of 2010, with the first television debates, ended in a hung parliament and five days of negotiation in which he resigned the leadership to keep the Liberal Democrats talking and then went to the palace when they chose Cameron. He has since been the UN's envoy for global education, the World Health Organisation's ambassador, an advocate of the union in the Scottish referendum of 2014, whose last-week speech is credited with some of the margin, and the writer of long books on what should be done.
- Lived: 1951 CE – ?
- Nationality: British
- Roles: prime minister, politician
