There is a certain kind of mentally disturbed person who sets a fire, calls the fire brigade, and then acts as the hero of the hour. Gordon Brown, the former British Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister, is a little like that: though whether or not he knows it is an interesting question. He helped, as far as was within his power, to cause one of the greatest financial debacles in history, and then posed as the economic savior of the world.

He has written a book, titled Beyond the Crash, which must be one of the longest self-exculpatory notes in history.[1] It is devoid of self-examination, and though Mr. Brown had none of the flashiness of his former boss and hated rival, Blair, his book is shot through with moral grandiosity of the kind that his father, a Church of Scotland minister in Kirkaldy, Scotland, passed on to him as a grim legacy, apparently at a very early age. The book is interesting, but only in the way that a paranoid psychotic’s ideas are interesting: that is to say, not for the truth content, but as a specimen of a certain kind of mind.

That mind itself (in Mr. Brown’s case) is dull, preternaturally dull, and it is hardly to be expected that dull thoughts should be expressed in sparkling prose. Mr. Brown is the type of writer who thinks that “at this moment” is more accurate than “now.” Indeed, he makes ditchwater