Brown Did Well in Boston, But Must Avoid the Blair Delusion

If ever a moment perfectly embodied the current calamity of Gordon Brown's premiership, it came at the White House on Thursday afternoon. On the one hand, the power and pomp of a summit with the US president to discuss mighty global issues. On the other, the decision to interrupt the schedule to make a pleading phone call to Sheffield to prevent the resignation of just about the most minor office-holder in the government. Sorry, Mr President, it's more important for Britain that I talk to Angela Smith about tax right now.

It is hard to imagine a more exquisite example of the sometimes brutal mismatch between outward pretension and inner turmoil in Brown's existence than this abject prime ministerial phone call from the White House to talk Smith down off the political window-ledge. It is not good for Brown and it is definitely not good for Britain. It is true that this duality has always been deep within Brown and that he probably cannot change it. Even in the good times Brown has always been an unusually striking combination of vaulting global visionary and obsessive domestic operator cohabiting inside the same rumpled suit. However on this trip to the United States the two Browns have been compelled to parade in the public spotlight together - and it is a demeaning sight in a prime minister.

Washington is a place that exposes the tensions between aspiration and reality more pitilessly than any other. Even if the Americans didn't keep talking to him about Churchill all the time, it would be hard for any visiting British prime minister not to feel puffed up by a sense of history and by a feeling of walking in hallowed footsteps. But the immanence of American hyper power can be daunting too. Washington makes visiting prime ministers feel important but at the same time it exposes how little they really count for.

Brown being Brown - congenitally incapable of switching off from managing the domestic political process - the contrast has been greatly intensified this week by the rapid drain of authority at home. While one part of Brown's sleepless brain continued to engage with pressing issues such as the credit crunch and epochal challenges like reform of the global institutions, on which he made a significant speech in Boston yesterday, the other part stayed down and dirty in the British political bear pit.

Fixing Smith's wobbly was the most dramatic example of this rear-view mirror fixation. But in Washington Brown was also fighting Frank Field's revolt over the 10p tax rate abolition, fulminating against Lord Desai and the former minister Brian Wilson for their brutal press comments, and fretting about the local elections. As well he might - especially if he studied the latest straw in the wind of Labour's southern discomfort. In a Suffolk county council by election on Thursday, Labour's share of the vote slumped from 33% in 2005 (which wasn't itself a great labor year) to an 8.8% fourth place behind even the Greens. With Gwyneth Dunwoody's death, there is now also a Westminster by election in Crewe and Nantwich to worry about, one that labor cannot afford to lose.

It is always tempting for both politicians and media to regard these sweaty battles as a much more real and vivid dimension of politics than a speech about the reform of international institutions in an age of globalisation. It's tempting because partly true. After all, who's really interested in another speech when the prime minister is a wounded animal? And which of us needs reminding that Brown is a past master at trying to distract the public from his embarrassments and failures? As one senior labor figure put it to me this week: "You can always tell things are going wrong at home when Gordon presses the button marked Africa."

Even so, politics always was about abstract nouns as well as concrete nouns. Moreover most politicians - and Brown typifies this - are in public life to do good as well as to make a name. And anyway it is difficult to argue, in the face of climate change, nuclear proliferation, Islamist terrorism, global economic failure and the damage of Iraq - and with Darfur, Palestine, Somalia, Tibet and Zimbabwe, among others, unresolved - that the world would not benefit from better international processes and institutions. We must not hide behind an ineffective United Nations.

That is the reason why, in spite of all the distractions and justifiable doubts, Brown's speech in Boston yesterday should actually be taken seriously. For Brown is right. The world's political, financial and security institutions are not equal to the world's political, financial and security problems. They need to be reformed. They need the US to be fully engaged so that they can be reformed effectively. That process needs all the impetus it can get.

That was the essence of Brown's message at the Kennedy Library and it could hardly be a more pressing one, not least for Americans themselves. Pressure needs to come from other international quarters too, and it ought to be a more prominent part of the US presidential election debate - though it won't be. There is plenty of serious thinking going on in Washington (not least in books by Madeleine Albright and, in particular, by Strobe Talbott). But if the next president does not have a strategy that gives the international agenda (and this includes the Middle East) real heft immediately after the election in 2009-10, there is a severe danger that the exigencies of the US campaign cycle may relegate the issue in the next administration's priorities until 2015-16.

So Brown did some good work in Boston yesterday. But there remains a danger that he will dissipate his effectiveness by deluding himself, as Tony Blair did, into believing that he is uniquely able to shape American global thinking. He is not. Americans are capable of working out their own interests. Brown is not and never will be the author of American foreign policy. His priority ought to be to get Britain's own story straight - a story in which engagement in Europe, the British military effort, nuclear non-proliferation and climate change are the crucial unwritten chapters. It would be nice to believe that Brown shares the strategic view of these issues that David Miliband has begun to set out at the Foreign Office. But Brown still needs to prove that global institutional reform, like Africa perhaps, is not a button that he likes to press when things are getting out of control at home.