What should a former prime minister do?
Gordon Brown's fleeting appearance in the Commons Chamber, yesterday, left me pondering what a former PM should do after leaving No 10.
Both John Major and James Callaghan stayed on as party leader and leader of the opposition while their respective parties dusted themselves down after general election defeat.
So for a while they were prominent in debates, in replying to statements and at prime minister's questions. Margaret Thatcher was ejected by her own party in mid-term, and was fairly quiet thereafter, speaking a couple of times from the backbenches, and turning up to lend her personal support to various causes, such as Richard Shepherd's private member's bill calling for a referendum on the Maastricht Treaty.
But what should Mr Brown do? Personally, I would like to hear the architect of the financial policies of the last 13 years get up in the Commons and deliver the case for the defence. His legacy is being trashed at the dispatch box, by every Coalition minister and from the backbenches by every bright-eyed Conservative and Lib Dem newcomer. Even the rival candidates for the Labour leadership - all but one of them ministers in his last cabinet - are mostly edging discreetly away from the Brown legacy.
So is he just going to sit there and glower, or is he preparing some magisterial oration to justify the economic policies that he, above all, masterminded? It would be rather a pity if an awesome parliamentary career that began on 27 July 1983 with a memorable maiden speech simply petered out in occasional fleeting appearances on the backbenches. Let Gordon Brown take on his critics - it would be cathartic, good for the debate on the Budget, good for his party and, I suspect, good for him. Britain in general and Labour, in particular, need to assimilate the Brown legacy. The ex-PM is capable of powerful argument, and, if only for reasons of personal honour, he should deploy his talents.
And just to remind myself of Gordon Brown's powers of debate, I looked up that debut speech, which focused on the social consequences of unemployment, the "new arithmetic of depression and despair" in his (then) Dunfermline East constituency, and ridiculed the Thatcher government's response:
"Where are the jobs that the Chancellor, a member of a government who say that incentives are needed to get people back to work, is talking about? When pressed on this matter in the 1930s, one new Tory member representing a Scottish constituency told the unemployed miners in the upper wards of Lanarkshire that there were plenty of jobs for them in London as domestic servants.
"Perhaps the Minister for Social Security has an answer to the conundrum. Does he still believe what he wrote in "Centre Forward" in 1978? Does he still believe that there are plenty of jobs around for the unemployed as window cleaners? He wrote: 'I shall believe that there is a shortage of jobs when two window cleaners call for my custom in one week, one month or one year.'
Perhaps the government's answer to mass unemployment is for Britain to become a nation of window cleaners. In the same book, Centre Forward, the minister wrote that, to become a window cleaner: 'Little equipment is needed - a bucket, a leather or two and a ladder.'
When the prime minister talked regularly during the election about ladders of opportunity, I had not realised that the next Conservative government would have something quite so specific in mind..."
I'm Mark D'Arcy and I'll be writing about what goes on in the chambers and committee rooms at Westminster.
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