Do we like Gordon Brown?
Our score: 8 out of 10. On the right side on LGBTQ+ rights, migrants and global poverty, with a famous gaffe and old workplace allegations holding him back from a 9.
Gordon Brown was Tony Blair's Chancellor for a decade, then took over as Prime Minister in June 2007 and resigned in May 2010 after an election that left no party with a majority. He is the dour Scot who went from running the Treasury to running the country, and then spent his long afterlife on the world stage rather than the backbench.
The scandal that dogs him is workplace temper. In February 2010 reports surfaced of alleged intimidation of Downing Street staff, and the row ended up pulling in a helpline boss and a patron who resigned over it. Brown's side rejected it, with his Business Secretary saying nobody tolerates bullying in that government. No finding against him turned up in anything we read, so it stays an allegation.
Then there is the 2010 hot mic. Caught on a microphone he'd forgotten to remove, he called a voter a bigoted woman after a chat in the street, and the clip wrecked his campaign week. He went on radio to say he apologised if he'd said anything hurtful, and he pledged to apologise to her in person. Cringe, yes. A pattern of contempt for people, not on this evidence.
On the harm test he reads well. In a 2017 piece he called advancing LGBT rights a long, bitter and painful struggle, and he cited his apology to Alan Turing. In 2023 he warned of aggressive nationalism and said Trump had told Americans to blame immigrants. We couldn't pull a clean division-by-division record of his gay-rights votes, so that part is his words and acts as PM, not a vote count.
One stain is Iraq. As Chancellor he publicly backed the war, and in a biography extract reported in January 2026 he said he was misled like everybody else. Where you land depends on whether you read that as honest hindsight or as a convenient one. Fact-checkers have caught him out too: Channel 4 FactCheck rated his 2009 claim that only the Tories proposed spending cuts as not true.
The good stuff is long-haul. He hosted the April 2009 G20 summit in London, where leaders committed an extra 1.1 trillion dollars to the world economy. Since leaving office he has worked as the UN's special envoy for education, pushing to get 57 million children into school and calling aid cuts unacceptable. And in 2026 he took on an unpaid, part-time reviewer role for the government.