Gordon Brown
World Leader — born 1951
Gordon Brown was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; he succeeded Tony Blair.
Gordon Brown is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 to 2010, after a decade as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was born James Gordon Brown on February 20, 1951, in Giffnock, Renfrewshire, Scotland, the son of a Church of Scotland minister, and grew up in Kirkcaldy, Fife. He entered the University of Edinburgh at age 16 and earned a doctorate in history there in 1982.
He worked as a lecturer and television journalist before being elected Member of Parliament for Dunfermline East in 1983, the same intake as Tony Blair. Together they remade the Labour Party as New Labour, and after Labour's landslide victory in May 1997 Brown became Chancellor of the Exchequer.
His ten years at the Treasury were the longest continuous tenure in the office in modern times. He granted operational independence to the Bank of England in his first week, oversaw a long period of growth, expanded tax credits, and set the five economic tests that kept Britain out of the euro. He succeeded Blair as Prime Minister on June 27, 2007.
His premiership was dominated by the global financial crisis of 2008. He led the British government's bank rescue package — the partial nationalisation of Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds — and chaired the April 2009 G20 summit in London that coordinated a global fiscal response. He also signed the Climate Change Act 2008 and apologised on behalf of the British government for the historic treatment of Alan Turing. Labour lost the May 2010 general election and he resigned as party leader. He stood down from Parliament in 2015 and became United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education.
His given name Gordon began as a Scottish surname and place name, taken from the lands of Gordon in Berwickshire. The Gordon clan rose to prominence in north-east Scotland from the medieval period and gave the name to a famous Highland regiment. Use of Gordon as a first name spread from Scotland into wider English-speaking use during the 19th century.
About the name Gordon
Gender: Male · Origin: Scottish
From The Marshes. One Of Scotland's Great Clans. Surname.