His loyalty to the ultra-conventional woman of the manse required some disguise of his lifestyle. During a visit to the flat in Edinburgh, Elizabeth Brown found some items of female underwear in the bathroom. ‘I don’t know how they got there,’ exclaimed Brown with embarrassment. ‘They must have come by mistake from the laundry.’ In turn, his mother would be untroubled by his bachelorhood until, she confided to a friend, he met someone whom she could approve. Out of a sense of duty towards his parents, he agreed to a mixture of concealment and denial. Margarita faced other hurdles. Despite her unsnobbish charm, she found difficulty in supplanting the male culture of Brown’s circle. Sport was intrinsic to Brown’s life. Regularly he met a large group of friends, including many from his school, on the terraces at Murrayfield for rugby internationals or at club grounds for local football and rugby matches. Margarita was not invited. She was also excluded from his daily discussions and plots with his student allies about politics. In his second year at university he was elected chairman of the Labour Club, was the editor of the student newspaper, and was regularly sitting at the same desk in the university library, working so hard without coffee breaks that Madeline Arnot, who became a Cambridge don, later thanked him for her good degree. ‘I followed him as a role model,’ she later volunteered. Others followed Brown, albeit still a teenager, as a political leader.
In 1970, aged nineteen, disappointed like so many to have missed out on the student revolt witnessed in other cities such as Paris, he spotted an opportunity to assert student power in his own kingdom. The issue was whether the investments owned by Edinburgh University included shares in South African companies, a taboo for those seeking to destroy apartheid. The vice-chancellor Sir Michael Swann, a respected member of the Tory establishment and thus an easy man for Brown to dislike, stated publicly that the university did not invest in ‘companies known to be active in the support of apartheid’, but documents leaked to Brown by a disgruntled university administrator showed that in fact the university owned shares in many companies active in South Africa, including the mining company de Beers, which had been accused of unacceptable employment practices. Working from the student newspaper office, Brown composed a special news sheet exposing the university’s deception, electrifying the university’s community.
By accident rather than design, Brown found that midway through his studies he was leading a revolution, without realising the possible repercussions. Edinburgh’s establishment was a tight clique. Every lunchtime there was a procession of the city’s great and good from the university, financial institutions and government offices to the New Club. Their midday discussions during those days did not focus on censuring Swann for his deception, but expressed their apoplexy about the challenge to their authority by an upstart student posing as a symbol of integrity against a foreign impostor. In the long term the confrontation harmed Brown, but in the midst of the dispute his disarming manner towards the ruling class shone as a virtue.
By contrast to many of the ‘revolutionary’ students protesting in the 1960s across Britain and other parts of Europe and North America, Brown’s politics were reasoned and principled. He adhered to Labour’s traditional values. Unlike many students, he did not succumb to the emotional appeals of the Govan shipbuilders during their confrontation with Edward Heath’s government in 1971 over the closure of their yard; in fact he predicted the shipworkers’ ultimate failure. In an article for the student newspaper he criticised the ‘alternative society seekers, Trotskyite students and liberal documentary makers’ who had visited the Upper Clyde shipyards: ‘The trendies are looking in vain for their kind of revolution. While they may plan the final end of capitalism, the mass meetings, the George Square demos and the fighting talk of the stewards should not belie the real campaign on the Clyde; for this is a work-in not for workers’ control, but an attempt to save jobs, and not a demand for the abolition of private ownership.’ His analysis was probably correct, but his political inexperience blinded him to the machinations between the trade unions and the government. To his surprise, in 1972 Heath capitulated and agreed to invest in the doomed yard. Many aspiring politicians learnt from Heath’s humiliation, including Margaret Thatcher. Brown learnt the lesson twenty years later. His ragged journey to that eventual wisdom, understanding the art of political strategy and intrigue, started soon after he achieved a first class degree in history in 1972. Some would say that his was the best first ever awarded by the university.
Aged twenty-one, he embarked upon a doctorate about the Labour Party in Scotland which gradually developed over the following decade of research and writing into ‘The Labour Party and Political Change in Scotland 1918–29’. Originally he intended to explain the two-hundred-year development of labour from the seventeenth century to the emergence from the trade unions of the Labour Party in the twentieth century. His eventual thesis, less ambitiously, described Labour’s struggle to establish itself as the alternative to the Conservatives. In the course of his research he became entranced by the romanticism of Scotland’s heroic socialist pioneers – Keir Hardie, Robert Smillie, John Maclean, Willie Gallacher, John Wheatley – striving against capitalism to build the perfect society. In particular he alighted on James Maxton, a Presbyterian orator with spellbinding powers, preaching about socialism’s Promised Land. Maxton, the son of a Presbyterian headmaster closely involved in the Church, was MP for the Bridgeton seat in Glasgow from 1922 until his death in 1946. ‘He was a politician,’ wrote the great historian A.J.P. Taylor, ‘who had every quality – passion, sincerity, unstinted devotion, personal charm, a power of oratory – every quality save one – the gift of knowing how to succeed.’ In Brown’s words, Maxton, a crusading rather than a career politician, ‘had sought to make socialism the common sense of his age’. His Christian desire to promote human happiness and equality bore similarities to the sermons of the Reverend John Brown. During those years researching his PhD, Brown sought to learn from Maxton’s mistakes: the consequence of splits within a party and the occasional advantage in politics of being feared rather than loved. Scotland, he understood, produced two types of socialist – the romantic and the pragmatic. The ideal was to be the pragmatic inspired by the romantic. His test-bed was the campaign to embarrass Sir Michael Swann.
In November 1972 Brown proposed that he should be elected as rector of the university, a ceremonial office usually awarded to honour Establishment personalities. A precedent had been set the previous year with the election of Jonathan Wills, the editor of the student newspaper. To Swann’s relief Wills had resigned, but to his irritation Brown launched his first successful election campaign, a rousing operation supported by ‘Brown Sugars’, miniskirt-clad students posing as dolly girls. No one of that era would ever label Brown a puritanical Scot with a humourless, wooden face and a grating habit of repetitiously uttering identical slogans. On the contrary, he was regarded as an amusing, sincere idealist with a ‘little boy lost’ approach who articulately galvanised supporters to translate his ambitions into a convincing victory over Swann’s candidate.
With the new rector’s election came the right to chair meetings of the University Court, the ultimate authority. Excitedly, Brown exercised this power, with the intention of agitating against the university’s administrators and governors. The battle lines were drawn in a row that engulfed the campus. Outraged by the usurper, Swann sought to remove Brown as chairman. Brown responded with an appeal to the Court of Session, Edinburgh’s High Court, for a judgement against the vice-chancellor. Brown won. Swann tried one more legal ruse, but was outgunned when the Duke of Edinburgh, the university’s chancellor, influenced the University Court in Brown’s favour. Brown had appealed to Prince Philip for help through Margarita – his goddaughter.
The experience, Brown later acknowledged, was a baptism of fire. Delighting in the scandal, he sought to avoid pitfalls and to succeed by exhaustive preparation. Every event was treated as a serious occasion. His speeches could be made more effective, he learnt, by rehearsing them to his flatmates and asking them to suggest jokes. He advanced his arguments by carefully placing pertinent stories in newspapers. Patiently, he sat through tedious meetings with a pleasant, laid-back manner, displaying a high boredom threshold until he had worn down his opposition. Glorious successes were followed by miserable setbacks, but through it all the rector discovered the mechanics of power-broking and mobilising support. ‘It was quite a revelation to me to see that politics was less about ideals and more about manoeuvres,’ he