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Gordon Brown's new book teaches us, if nothing else, that we are to have another pious Christian for PM

Unsympathetic review of the Chancellor's forthcoming book, Courage: Eight Portraits, which 'amounts to a declaration of faith'.

'Whoever wrote Courage by Gordon Brown, he, she or they are to be congratulated," writes Catherine Bennett. "I have not read anything so thoroughly improving since the Reverend Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies, in which the reader must endure the protracted, watery afflictions of young Tom, ploughing on, right to the last pages, before the author finally asks, "And now, my dear little man, what should we learn from this parable?"

'In his eight portraits of "men and women of courage", on the other hand, the Reverend Brown's moral purpose confronts us from the first: "Their stories live on and inspire us," he begins his chapters on Edith Cavell, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Raoul Wallenberg, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Cicely Saunders and Aung San Suu Kyi. "They were prepared to endure great sacrifices and persist, some of them for many years, against the odds and in the face of the greatest adversity."

'And what else, my dear little man, should we learn from the chancellor's book, when it appears in June? Why, in the first place, that, in this largely secular and sceptical country, we are to have another pious Christian for a prime minister. In the past, Brown's spiritual life has been so mercifully private, in comparison to the lenten homilies and mantilla-draped devotions of the Blairs, that the question of his faith could generally be overlooked. In his 2004 biography of Brown, Tom Bower wrote: "Neither in public nor in private would he ever express thanks to God or refer to Christianity as an influence, guide or support for his life."

'No longer. The new book, in which five of Brown's eight peerless individuals are guided and sustained by a profound Christian faith (a characteristic that might make them elusive role models for non-believers), amounts, surely, to a declaration of faith. Repeatedly, as devotional passages by his heroes alternate with passages of authorial sympathy, the reader gathers that Brown shares their preference for active, socially engaged Christianity. Two of the subjects are, like Brown, the children of ministers, who come to interpret the role of their father's church as being - in Brown's words - "a servant of society". "Always his father stood before him 'like a mountain'," Brown writes about King, "yet he went on to face and overcome challenges his father could never have dreamed of." Cavell, on the other hand, learned from helping in her father's Norfolk ministry: "Edith would have been aware from the earliest days of her childhood that the world's abundance is not equally bestowed ... "'

Full story at The Guardian.