US wrote off ex-British PM Brown for his ‘abysmal track record’: Wikileaks cables

LONDON - Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was written off a year into his term by the United States, who mocked his ‘abysmal track record’ and treated his international initiatives with disdain, according to classified US diplomatic cables released by whistleblower website Wikileaks.

According to the Daily Mail, the cables reveal that Americans began sizing up Brown’s potential replacements as early as 2008 and concluded that then Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs David Miliband provided ‘rare moments of star power’ for the struggling Labour Party.

The U.S. embassy in London reported to Washington how Brown was stumbling from ‘political disaster to disaster’, and presiding over a ‘post-Blair rudderlessness’.

The cables also revealed that U.S. officials were irritated by Brown’s intense manner.

The former PM had interrupted a Thanksgiving call to US President Barack Obama’s ambassador to lobby for a Tobin tax on financial transactions despite having been repeatedly informed of American opposition.

“Prime minister Brown continues to press hard … despite being fully aware of US opposition to the tax,” the ambassador, Louis Susman, wrote in December last year.

Other documents suggest that the Americans treated Brown’s international efforts, from food summits to global disarmament and a UK national security council, with indifference bordering on contempt.

In a sign of Brown’s unsubtle negotiating tactics, Susman recorded dryly: “The prime minister has stated that he saw co-ordination of our actions on Afghanistan and financial services as the cornerstones of the UK-U.S. bilateral relationship, and has expressed disappointment that on the latter, the U.S. has not been as supportive as he had hoped.”

“The prime minister’s position is largely being driven by domestic politics, as a way to be seen as “punishing the banks”,” it added. (ANI)