THE TUESDAY BOOK: Inside the Mind of a Cautious Chancellor ; the Prudence of Mr Gordon Brown William Keegan John Wiley, Pounds 18.99

Beginning of article

THE CHANCELLOR attracts many cliches: prudence (who became Prudence, successor as fiscal pin-up to the Treasury Model); Calvinism (though predestination has played no part in Gordon Brown's anxious endeavours); and a relationship with Tony Blair variously seen as brotherly love, two-man bob and fatal embrace. So we needed William Keegan's book. It is not a biography but an intellectual history, rich in information, the only way of approaching this serious-purposed man.

For Keegan, Brown must be seen long-term. He has not stopped being a social democrat and is deeply mindful of poverty, his freeze on public capital spending part of a long strategy for winning …