For Gordon Brown, redemption is at hand

The particular figure from mythology that Gordon Brown brings to mind as he enters the War For the Union is a matter for nerdsome speculation. He could be Achilles, finally persuaded to stop sulking in his tent by Agamemnon’s delegation and return to the plains of Troy to rescue the Greek coalition armies from imminent catastrophe. Or he might be Ir’n Broon, a cyclopean version of the intellectually brilliant but socially awkward Tony Stark, summoned to arms in his alternate guise of Iron Man to spearhead planetary resistance against malevolent northern deity Lowki (Alex Salmond) when all looked doomed.

But whether the template be ancient or modern, and hard as some will find it to believe in the transformation, Gordon is reborn as a superhero today. He has been one before, of course, if only in his own mind, when that amusing slip of the tongue revealed his belief that he had “saved the world”.

This progression from saving the world to protecting the union clearly lacks narrative coherence. Ideally, he would have salvaged the integrity of Great Britain as a warm-up – like playing Queen’s Club before Wimbledon – and then gone on to rescue the earth from financial Armageddon. But little in Gordon’s troubled life is ever ideal, and it’s marvellous to have him back.

It does the heart a power of good to find the old boy marauding through Scotland as saviour of a Better Together campaign conducted with such smug incompetence that it has itself come to resemble a character from The Iliad (a Trojan Horse into the heart of the unionwheeled by Salmond of the Many Wiles).

One of the minor pleasures about the awakening of Rip Van Brown is the crashing irony that the survival of David Cameron, who whatever he parrots to the contrary would be finished by a Yes win, finds his survival in the hands of a man he treated with the entitled young laird’s patrician contempt for an uppity beater on the grouse moor.

Labour’s future electoral prospects are also on the line, of course, but a smaller figure than Gordon might have chosen to leave his auld enemy to his fate. If he does pull it off, one hopes that Mr Cameron will go beyond drenching him with gratitude, and privately apologise to him for underestimating the most epic and fascinating of his breed since Margaret Thatcher.

Whether he will pull it off is anyone’s guess (the feeling in the bones becomes more ominous by the day), but there is a strange comfort in the nostalgic vision of Gordon once again unleashing the clunking fist that made him such a fearfully effective machine politician.

The glorious Gordon-ness of calling the vague and panicky bribe of home rule he announced on Monday a “command plan” was a nostalgic delight. So was his declaration that the deadline for unveiling the details of the Home Rule Bill bribe will be St Andrew’s Day on 30 November (by the way, as if any underlining that is a desperate rearguard to save Britain were required, this is also Churchill’s birthday); and that the one for introducing it to the Commons will be Burns Night on 25 January. This two-pronged appeal to patriotic pride was so exquisitely subtle that it almost qualified as subliminal messaging.

Also a secondary pleasure is that another auld enmity is being revived. Rupert Murdoch is reportedly close to putting the weight of the Scottish Sun behind his friend Mr Salmond’s cause. Whatever Murdoch wants, as if it needs stating, he wants solely for himself. If he calculates that a shrunken UK bereft of its Scottish MPs, and quite possibly under perpertual Tory rule, will be an infinitely easier one to bully into promoting his commercial interests (allowing him, for example, to take a 100 per cent stake in BSkyB), he doubtless calculates correctly. If Gordon, who insists that The Sun forced him into co-operating with its exclusive about his son’s diagnosis of cystic fibrosis, can land one on Murdoch, who could blame him for enjoying a slice of revenge eaten still piping hot?

But the real joy in seeing Devomaxman storming to the rescue lies in the tantalising prospect of him saving not only the union but his reputation. The tragedy of Gordon Brown was the familiar one of a fundamentally good man with the capacity for greatness undone by flaws – the obsessiveness, the inability to project the warmth people say he shows in private, the pure avarice for power that atrophied his best intentions – he could not disguise, let alone suppress.

A grander figure by far than Mr Tony Blair and Mr Cameron, he does not deserve to remembered solely for the temper tantrums, the rictus grin, and a financial crisis for which he was not primarily responsible.

How much difference his intervention will make is unguessable now, and may never be knowable. It might make none, and it might be the clincher. But if the Scots do vote to stay within the union, it will be styled as Gordon’s victory, and he will become not the Prime Minister who did horrendous damage to his country, but the former PM who saved it.

That may be as misleading a legend as the one it replaced. But he will have his redemption, and it would be a petty, vindictive soul who begrudged him that.