THE GUARDIAN: US wrote off Brown after first year as PM and blamed him for 'post-Blair rudderlessness' which had Labour figures in despair
The US embassy in London wrote off Gordon Brown within a year of his arrival in No 10 after concluding that an "abysmal track record" had left him lurching from "political disaster to disaster", according to cables released by WikiLeaks.
In a scathing assessment of the former prime minister, George Bush's last ambassador to London blamed Brown for presiding over a "post-Blair rudderlessness" which prompted senior Labour figures to complain of their despair to the embassy.
The diplomatic cables confirm that Barack Obama's allies were irritated by Brown's intense manner: he interrupted a Thanksgiving call to the current president's ambassador to lobby for a Tobin tax on financial transactions in the face of US opposition. "Prime minister Brown continues to press hard … despite being fully aware of US opposition to the tax," Louis Susman wrote in December last year.
US diplomats monitored the troubled premiership in detail and told Washington about the rules for replacing a Labour leader and Brown's likely successors. Read on and comment >>> Nicholas Watt, chief political correspondent | Thursday, December 02, 2010
