When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in June 2007, only Atlee and Churchill before him had had more experience in high office before achieving the top job. He should have been a known quantity. Yet, after more than twenty-five years in the public realm he is still a mystery.
Journalist Suzie Mackenzie first interviewed Gordon Brown over fourteen years ago. Now, as Brown struggles to maintain the premiership he so waited so long to achieve, Mackenzie has been granted an unprecedented degree of access - to both the PM himself and to those closest to him - to write a unique account of his life.
Mackenzie's interest is not so much the 'events' that Harold Macmillan once famously proposed were the major determinants of a political career - although Brown's career has not been short on incident - but the character of the man himself. From rallying after the early loss of the sight in his left eye, transforming what many saw as his disastrous decision not to contest the Labour Party leadership in 1994 into a ten-year-plus period as the Chancellor presiding over Britain's longest-ever period of growth, to garnering international respect for his part in the G20 summit in the face of the global economic meltdown, his is a nature that responds when crisis must be turned to recovery.
But Gordon Brown's story is still unfolding, transfixing both commentators and voters with its twists and turns. Here, Suzie Mackenzie does not aim to judge his success as a prime minister - or, not only that. Instead, writing with immense insight, and drawing on in-depth conversations with those who work with him and for him, with relatives and friends, and with political foes and reluctant admirers, she has produced an extraordinary, multi-faceted portrait of the growth - political, intellectual, psychological - of Britain's most intriguing politician.
