Word: gordons
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With its dark furniture, high-tech gadgets and model jet plane, Philip Green's London office feels a lot like the work area of an investment banker or hedge fund manager. On the wall behind his enormous desk, there's even a photograph of Wall Street antihero Gordon Gekko. But on this May morning, a daytime-TV segment flickering on his sleek, flat-screened television betrays his role as a master of an entirely different universe: women's fashion...
What are the qualities demanded of a leader? Wisdom? Integrity? Experience? Perhaps. But what really counts may be pubbability - an elusive X factor that makes voters want to share a pint with a politician. And on that front, Gordon Brown - the 56-year-old Scot who is expected to replace Tony Blair as Britain's Prime Minister this summer - has a problem...
...first sight, Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy would seem to continue the Anglo-French tradition of coming from different planets. Sarkozy, who won an easy victory in the French presidential runoff election on May 6, is the son of a capricious Hungarian émigré aristocrat. A mediocre student who still refers painfully to the "humiliations" of his childhood, he embraced Gaullist conservatism as a young man when most of his contemporaries were reveling in the make-love-not-war spirit of the late '60s. He triumphed in the French vote by painting himself as the candidate of change. "Together...
...Gordon was the last Cabinet colleague you'd have thought of suggesting a drink with," says Baroness Morris of Yardley, who worked alongside Brown when she was Secretary of State for Education and Skills. Bob Geldof, the musician and Live Aid activist, developed a close relationship with Brown while lobbying him on Africa. Yet he, too, sees limits to their camaraderie. "Would it be easy to spend a night in a bar with him?" asks Geldof. "No, he'd get bored. Not with you, but with that chitchat level." Even Brown's inner circle frets about the friendliness-factor issue...
...Labour's annual conference last fall, the premier-in-waiting made awkward progress around a reception organized by the party and full of potential donors, thrusting a large hand at unfamiliar guests and deploying a lame icebreaker about the conference venue in the industrial capital of northwest England. "Gordon Brown," he boomed at each encounter. "What do you think of Manchester?" One of his interlocutors, a party stalwart who has worked with Brown since before Labour swept to power in 1997, quietly reminded him that they were long-standing colleagues. His tousled host shook his mighty head like a bull...