ISN'T DOUR SCOT REDUNDANT?:

A Dour Scot on Blair's Team, Eager for Him to Go (SARAH LYALL , 5/07/05, NY Times)

James Gordon Brown was born on Feb. 20, 1951, in Glasgow, the middle of three sons of a minister in the stern Church of Scotland whose devotion extended to believing that it was ungodly to buy even a newspaper on Sundays. Times were so tough that laid-off workers came begging at their door when the local linoleum factory closed down.

Instilled with a strong work ethic, an abiding sympathy for the less well-off and, he later said, "a simple basic philosophy, based on a Christian tradition, that as humans we are able to shape the circumstances in which we live," the precocious Gordon was admitted to Edinburgh University at the age of 16. He immersed himself in student politics and rose through the ranks of the Scottish Labor Party until he was elected to Parliament in 1983. There, he and another young Labor member of Parliament, Tony Blair, began the long task of modernizing their downtrodden party.

While his talent has never been in doubt, Mr. Brown's personality is apparently something of an acquired taste. Rumpled and tired-looking, said by the historian Peter Hennessy to have "the social skills of a whelk," he is regularly described as dour, serious, bereft of small talk, nerdily obsessed with policy. He married a former public relations executive when he was 49; the couple have a young son. Their terrible grief after an earlier child died in infancy has done almost more than anything to humanize the so-called "Iron Chancellor" in the eyes of the public.

Although the British economy had already begun expanding when Labor came to power, Mr. Brown has taken credit for its record since: sustained economic growth, low unemployment and low interest and inflation rates. Determined to dispel Labor's longtime reputation as a party of tax-and-spend irresponsibility, he kept a tight rein on spending at first, then devoted the money he had saved to public services, most notably in the chronically underfinanced National Health Service.

That does not mean that the good news will continue, or that the chancellor is universally admired. Criticizing what he said was Mr. Brown's "public spending spree and public sector recruitment binge," Allister Heath, editor of the newspaper Business, wrote in The Spectator recently that Mr. Brown's "achievements over the past eight years have been greatly exaggerated, and the future looks full of menace" - with interest rates threatening to rise as Britons wrestle with record levels of personal debt.

Mr. Brown, who in recent months has turned his attention toward pressing rich countries to increase international development aid by billions of dollars, has never made a secret of his political ambitions. But his long, tortured relationship with Mr. Blair has only added to the sense that there are roiling waters beneath his stolid, awkward surface.