This is our prime minister’s second book, in a very short space of time, about the people he wishes us to know that he admires, perhaps so that we might follow their example. The first book, Courage: Eight Portraits, was about famous people who’ve done good, a somewhat predictable list of modern-day saints to which only Joseph Goebbels or Eugene Terreblanche could object. We did not learn an awful lot about Gordon Brown by discovering that he thinks Martin Luther King and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were, by and large, rather good eggs. Nor, through the sturdy, ghosted, prose, did we learn anything new about them. This latest book is about the less heralded heroes of Britain today, people whose stories have inspired Gordon, unquestionably noble individuals who have devoted their lives to some form of uplifting community activity. Perhaps next time out he will vary the theme and we’ll get “The Gordon Brown Book of Nonces, Wrong ’Uns and Racists”, though I would not bet on it. More likely it will be a book about the sorts of animals he finds commendable, or certain colours he’s noticed while travelling around the country and a brief explanation as to why he thinks they’re nice. Mauve, for example, or yellow.

Britain’s Everyday Heroes reads as if it were drawn up by a democratic subcommittee comprising Church of Scotland prelates and those people who compose the local-authority job adverts for The Guardian – which is not too far from the truth, as it happens. (In an author’s note, Gordon thanks the charity Community Links for researching the stories “that are now told” – an odd way, surely, for an “author” to refer to his work.) The prose is colourless, deathly and grim. “I’ve been to Leicester several times in recent months,” may go down as the least arresting opening line to a chapter in the history of literature, although there’s plenty more where that came from.

More to the point, we find out nothing about the people who have done all these good deeds; there is no insight into their character, nothing to make them come alive for us. Bruce Crowther, for example, who led the team of campaigners that made Garstang, in Lancashire, the “world’s first Fairtrade Town” may well be an interesting chap – but in Gordon’s clunking fist, he doesn’t even exist. He is simply a cipher for his good works. That’s because the purpose of this book was not to bring Crowther and the rest of them to our attention, but to bring Gordon to our attention. To let us know that he thinks people who do good things are, um, a good thing and thus to bask in a little bit of reflected glory. But even the principal character of this book – Gordon Brown – steadfastly refuses the temptation to leap off the page and nor are we afforded an insight into his political philosophy. Selfless, community-aware, individualism (which used to be called, with the trace of a sneer, “hobbit socialism”) clearly appeals to Gordon, but he does not tell us how governments might harness such disparate energy, nor even if they should do so. He announces, at the outset, that the people he writes about here “have given me a fresh insight into the needs and aspirations of our country,” but he declines to share that insight with the rest of us.

The imagination and fortitude shown by the actors in this book are undoubtedly immense. Our last prime minister had a push-button facility to emote and was much given to hyperbole. Our current prime minister, meanwhile, has the ability to make the extraordinary seem crushingly dull. That’s infinitely preferable in a politician, I suppose.

BRITAIN’S EVERYDAY HEROES: The Making of the Good Society by Gordon Brown with Community Links
Mainstream £10.99 pp240
Buy the book here at the offer price of £9.89 (inc p&p)

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