I have been re-reading the works of Goethe. Not required reading these days, and almost certainly ignored in the UK’s State school system, where ticking boxes is the main curricular activity.

Goethe was the great psychologist, always looking beyond the outer shell of life to source-material of which most people are unaware — material that opens us up to archetypal situations which appear as recurring patterns in human history.

Take Goethe’s most famous work, Faust, in which the eponymous university professor makes a pact with the devil in the person of Mephistopheles. Faust sells his soul in exchange for receiving everything he’s ever desired, including the incorruptible Gretchen. Mephistopheles craftily defers his own gratification by putting off the day when he will collect Faust’s soul.

Reading the famous play again, I’m reminded of Gordon Brown’s new-found soulmate Peter Mandelson, recently rehabilitated to the Brownian universe by the PM’s aching desperation to win a general election.

Brown’s stodgy performance in power cries out for a mastermind to guide him to at least one electoral victory on his own terms. With Tony Blair out of the way, Brown has foundered badly.

The pact with Mandelson, to drive power and its trappings to his putative master, gained new intensity this week with news of the Machiavellian scheme to deliver Britain into the euro currency, whether its people agreed or not. British voters have always been cruelly deceived on EU matters anyway, and were sold out on the constitution by Brown and Blair, who both ratted on a promise of a referendum.

Dumping Britain into the failing Eurozone was probably part of the pact the new Business Secretary extorted from Brown as his fee for helping win the next election. Mandelson is now Deputy Prime Minister in all but name.

Which brings me to the School of Leonid Brezhnev.

Brezhnev was made Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet after helping to sack the former incumbent. He became the first man in Soviet Union history to hold both the leadership of the party and of the State.

Apart from his clunking Politburo totalitarianism, he is best known for the Brezhnev Doctrine, which asserted the right of Soviet intervention in cases where “the essential common interests of other socialist countries are threatened by one of their number.” Or indeed no-one in particular.

In his eleven years of high office, first as Chancellor of the Exchequer for a decade, and now Prime Minister, Brown has reserved the right to interfere in all aspects of national life, and to micromanage the thoughts, activities and behaviour of every individual in the land.

The Brown Doctrine dispenses a pin-down band of control around everyone, enforced by law. It is acutely sensed by anyone outside the tribe that rules us. Those who are not paid off by State benefits, or non-jobs as “outreach workers” in the public sector, are still dazed by the extent of the country’s descent into elective dictatorship.

Nicknamed “the big, clunking fist” by his predecessor Tony Blair, Brown lives up to it, despite constantly asserting his “moral compass”.

Britain is ruled by the Brezhnevian Brown Doctrine, supplemented now by a Mephistophelian vision of unlimited Continental power, driven by Lord Mandelson’s moth-like attraction to control in all its forms.

Goethe has the angel chorus in Faust sing the following verse:

Woe! Woe!
Thou hast destroyed
The beautiful world,
By a mighty fist …

That should be Gordon Brown’s epitaph. Let it be required soon.

John Evans

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