Johann Hari

Gordon Brown, our smiling soon-to-be PM, will be the most bookish and ideas-driven Prime Minister in the century since Lord Salisbury hung up his top hat. Yes, Harold Macmillan read Edward Gibbon and Margaret Thatcher leaned on Freidrich von Hayek, but Brown is a man who inhales philosophical treatises for breakfast and snacks on Gertrude Himmelfarb's history of the Enlightenment for brunch.

So to properly understand Brown's politics, you have to pore over his intellectual influences. During this odd six-week leadership campaign with no other contenders, I'll be periodically picking through them - and the best place to start is with a lantern-jawed, brooding Scottish politician called James Maxton who first inspired Brown into politics.

Brown has written that "the story of James Maxton and the Clydeside MPs who descended on Westminster in 1922 has fascinated me since I was a teenager." He wrote his PhD thesis on him, and as a young man even seemed to model his appearance on Maxton, growing a long forelock ("definitely not for tugging", he added).

So who was this lost prophet, and is he still lurking somewhere in Gordon Brown's psyche? James Maxton was the child of two middle class schoolteachers born on the South Side of Glasgow in 1885 - and within a few deacdes, he became the best-known revolutionary socialist in Britain.

His politics were formed in a jolt in his early twenties, when he was sent to teach in the Glasweigan slums. Confronted with "a class of pale, stunted tenement-dwelling slum children," he discovered that a thousand kids died every year in Glasgow of tuberculosis, and that emaciation and rickets were virtual infestations.

Maxton became prominent in a series of socialist strikes that brought Glasgow to a halt. When he opposed the First World War, he was tossed into prison for a year for "sedition." On his emergence, he announced: "Everyone should have at least ten days in prison annually for the good of both their health and their immortal souls."

Maxton was the most famous of the "Red Clydesiders" elected as an MP in 1922, where Labour washed away the Liberals as the main opposition party. His manifesto called for a mimimum wage in industry, family allowances at home, and a windfall tax on the super-rich. But he wanted much more, including mass nationalisation without compensation.

He treated the Tories in parliament with contempt. When he was accused of being "improper" and showing "bad breeding" in the chamber of the House of Commons for referring to a Tory MP by his name rather than his constituency, Maxton replied about Conservative policies: "I think it is the very worst form, that it shows bad breeding, to kick a man who is in the gutter, or to withdraw a crust from a starving child. That is the Glasgow idea of conduct and breeding."

Brown clearly saw a lot of himself in Maxton. In fascinating passages of Freudian projection, he wrote in his PhD: "Many of his beliefs sprang from the Christian principles of duty and service and not a little perhaps from a middle-class social conscience. 'I always feel guilty when I have something denied to the majority of my fellows', he once explained."

But Maxton achieved little in parliament beyond beautiful words. He ended his career hideously, calling for appeasement of the Nazis. He was unable to see the difference between the unjust catastrophe of the First World War and the necessary horrors of the Second. The great historian AJP Taylor said in an obituary: "He was a politician who had every quality, save one - the gift of knowing how to succeed."

To read a young Brown wrestling with the legacy of James Maxton is to wade into the first great political dillemma for anyone on the left. Do you stand outside the existing contaminated political structures, describe them with total honesty, and demand they be total remade? This poses the risk of impotence. Or do you sully yourself, enter into the political process with all the ugly compromises that requires, and try to incrementally change it from within? This poses the risk of becoming corrupted.

We all know Gordon Brown's decision. But in the process - of sucking up to Rupert Murdoch, the CBI and all the rest - does any flicker of Maxton survive? Perhaps the best answer is to imagine, on Brown's first night as Prime Minister, that the ghost of his youthful hero appears to him in his study.

With the sound of victory celebrations echoing from downstairs, a spectral Maxton begins: "Gordon, it's me. Dinnae be shocked. I know I look a bit peely-wally, but being dead for sixty years does that to ye. I've been watching you for an awful long time, and I'm confused. I can see that I had some effect on that forming brain. I wanted a minimum wage and family credit and aye, you've done me proud there. I once called Winston Churchill a murderer for abolishing free school milk for the bairns - but you've brought it back, and added free fruit too. I spent my life calling for more money for education, and ye've doubled the cash. I watched that and thought - I'm no' dead yet."

As a proud tear forms in Gordon's eye, Maxton suddenly turns stern. "But my god boy, what else have ye been doing? I ken you took 800,000 children out of poverty - but what comfort is that to the 650,000 people who died in Iraq after you signed the cheques? I wrote that 'the prosperity of any of the wealthy families is founded on robbery, swindling, or vice' - and wi' you in charge, they've got even richer. The International Monetary Fund classifies Britain as a tax haven these days, for cryin' oot loud! I used to fight against Ramsay McDonald, but you are in league with Ronald McDonald."

His jaw jutting forward, Gordon would interupt. "It's true. To get here I made compromises. Terrible compromises. I'm not sorry for ditching your belief in mass nationalisations and all that - we'd have even more poor kids if I hadn't ditched socialism for social democracy - but the rest?"

He lets out a long, guilty sigh. "And yet... James, you were a lesson to me in more than one way. All that brilliance, all that moral rectitude - and for what? You passed no legislation, you achieved nothing, the breakaway left-wing party you founded dwindled away after your death. I wanted to achieve something for those poor kids you cared about, even if it meant messy hands." "Messy?" Maxton snaps back. "You mean bloody."

So was the choice Gordon Brown made as a young man - to pick a very different path to his hero - worth it? The next few years, and whether he delivers for poor children, will show us. The ghost of James Maxton will be watching.

POSTSCRIPT: You can send comments on this article for publication in the Indie to letters@independent.co.uk or just for me to johann -at- johannhari.com

You can read more articles I've written about British politics here.