'I am," Gordon Brown was reported as saying to general bafflement in Davos last week, "reminded of the story of Titian." The celebrated Renaissance painter may have created nearly 100 great artworks in his lifetime but supposedly declared at the end of it all, "I'm finally beginning to learn how to paint." And that, opined the PM, after 12 years in charge of the British economy and faced with what he called the first financial crisis of the global age, "is where we are".
Oh no you're not, says Peter Morgan, who wrote the film Frost/Nixon and also created Brown's character in TV's The Deal. You're more like Richard Nixon. "People will hate me for saying this, but there are emotional similarities between Gordon Brown and Richard Nixon," Morgan reckons. "They are people who are hard to like, people who have complicated emotional inner landscapes, and somehow have had trouble accessing them.
Gordon Brown finds it hard to be liked and yet he's a brilliant man. But people don't warm to him."
You may think the disgraced 37th president of the US, the leading light of the 16th-century Venetian school and an early 21st-century British prime minister have little in common. Think again.
