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Laugh? I almost cried at Gordon Brown’s night of Edinburgh fringe comedy

Brian Logan
·3 min read

Where is the comedy, Matt Forde, in this? Where is the comedy in bringing on to the stage intellectual and moral colossus Gordon Brown, just as the vote for our next PM is cast between a remainder-bin Thatcher who can’t find her way out of a room, and a squillionaire who doesn’t just want to rob the poor to give to the well-off, but appears to admit it? OK, so Forde is a comedian as well as a mimic, and his Political Party show is branded as comedy – but when Brown came on stage for his hour’s chat on the Edinburgh fringe, to an ovation from this home crowd, I practically burst out crying.

So did Forde, mind you: he was clearly in the presence of his political hero, and his Brown-nosed interrogation here threw only the softest of balls in the ex-PM’s direction. One might have wished for a more testing examination of a man who, it could be argued, let the financial sector off the hook after the 2008 crash, opened up the NHS to private interests, cosied up to the Daily Mail – and contrived to lose an election to that political homunculus David Cameron. Forde didn’t even ask Brown about his vexed relationship with Tony Blair, a man whose name, remarkably, was not once uttered in this hour-long conversation. As opposed to Peter Mandelson, whom Forde did ask Brown about, to amusingly terse effect.

Elsewhere, Brown wasn’t terse – contrary to the “dour” image conjured by his often Scotophobic critics. He was at ease, garrulous, entertaining even – doing his best to furnish the comedy promised us when we bought our tickets. He told us stories about Berlusconi fretting about his makeup as the global economy burned, about Mandela’s illicit drinking at his 90th birthday party, about the differences between Putin and Alex Salmond (“One is a dictator who will stop at nothing …”). He laughs at his own shortcomings, particularly as a communicator. “Have you got a good impression of me?” he asks Forde at one point, and when Forde demurs, Brown responds: “I’m not very good at doing myself either.”

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Even as a voter who spent the New Labour years carping from the left about their caution and their compromises, the frustration I feel that Brown was unable to show this side of himself to the electorate is exquisite. He wishes, he said, he’d had the chance to prevent austerity, to do more to eradicate child poverty – and (my reverie kicks in) to bring about a world in which Cameron, May, Johnson, Rees-Mogg et al HAD NEVER HAPPENED! It could bring a(nother) tear to your eye. Where, Matt Forde, is the comedy in this?

The show ended with Forde inviting the ex-PM to talk about his current charity work, redistributing surplus stock from Amazon and elsewhere to poor families in Fife. At which point, thoughts stray to the likely post-PM activities of Boris Johnson, beginning a few weeks from now … If Matt Forde wishes to involve Gordon Brown in a comedy event, might I suggest some sort of It’s a Knockout roustabout with Brown pelting the current cabinet with canned products from the food banks that barely existed when Labour was in power? At least Brown expressed great confidence here that the party under Keir Starmer is now well positioned to capitalise on a national mood that’s hungry for change, more so than in 1997.

I daren’t believe it: we’ve been disappointed and denied too often since the day Brown himself left Downing Street, 12 long years ago. Until someone of his stature and substance returns, events such as these can only be bittersweet. It’s two stars as a comedy, then, but five stars as a vision of what once was, and what – dare to dream – we might one day have again.