Gordon Brown has one last service to perform for Labour | Martin Kettle

The former PM will have plenty of options when he leaves the Commons, but before that Scottish Labour needs his help

The idea of politics without Gordon Brown, never mind Gordon Brown without politics, takes some getting used to. With the exception of his brilliant saving-the-day cameo during the Scottish referendum campaign in September, the former prime minister has been out of the spotlight for more than four years now. Yet there are few modern politicians who have spent so many hours of every day of every year doing politics as he. For 40 years he was the Labour party’s equivalent of Dylan Thomas’s Organ Morgan, except that with Brown it was “Labour Labour” not “organ organ” all the time. It used to feel as if Brown had been like this from about the age of six.

Nevertheless in May, by which time he will be 64, Brown says he will be gone. On Monday he announced he would be leaving the House of Commons after a 32-year stint in which he has rarely been off the frontbenches, whether in opposition or in government. Yet Brown is still a relatively young man, and he is certainly still a big figure, both at home and abroad. It is hard to imagine that he will simply retreat to Dunruling and write his memoirs – though this man of parts could write one of the great political memoirs in British letters if he took the time and the trouble to do it properly.

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