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Spot the difference

Twenty-five years ago yesterday, Manchester United appointed a new manager. Less than a year later, a young MP by the name of Tony Blair was given his first post in Labour’s shadow cabinet. One went on to be the Red’s most successful leader, returning them to heights of power they hadn’t seen since the 1960s. The other was Sir Alex Ferguson.

But what if their situations had been reversed? What if Ferguson had been the politician? (If only, you might say.) Here’s what I think would have happened:

Ferguson would have got rid of Brown
Fergie would never have tolerated Brown’s insubordination. In his time at United, anyone who challenged him – Beckham, Keane, Stam – was given the boot, in Beckham’s case quite literally. It made Ferguson unpopular, but he did it anyway. Blair never quite had the balls, and it was arguably the biggest mistake of his premiership.

We still would have gone to war in Iraq
Ferguson loves conflict, both necessary and unnecessary, so whatever you think of Iraq, you have to believe that he would have gone in. Like Blair, he would have found the chance to wield real power impossible to turn down.

There still would have been a financial crisis
In his own mind, Ferguson is Old Labour through and through. (“Arthur Scargill with boots on,” according to the Telegraph.) But in fact, like New Labour, he’s adapted fully to the demands of capitalism. He may not like being ruled by the Glazers. He may not like United being loaded up with their debt. But he doesn’t speak out against them – because doing so would jeopardise his project. He’s made the same deal with the Glazers that Blair and Brown made with the City.

Not that different after all. And that’s the funny thing about Fergie: he’s done incredible things, but his legacy is mainly his succcess. He’s led one of the biggest teams around to an incredible spell of domination. He hasn’t changed football – not like a Michels or a Cruyff, a Thatcher or a Reagan. In that sense, too, he resembles Blair.

And if Tony had been managing Man U? He would have done all right. Then, in 2003, he would have been ousted by a committe of players led by the Gordon Brown of football, Roy Keane. Keane would have taken over for a short, dismal spell at the helm. And United would now be managed by … Sven Goran Cameron.

Gordon Brown spoke very well at TED. Yes, you read that right. He was charming, moving, passionate, frank and deeply moral – the prime minister we wish he had, not the one we think we’ve got.

I was particularly impressed by the way Brown referred to the “corrupt” Burmese regime, or the “fixed” Zimbabwean election. Hardly world-changing views I know, but he did so in a direct, down-to-earth way, without any sense that he was posturing or grandstanding.

One philosophical note. At the beginning of his talk, Brown shows a series of iconic photos of suffering and poverty. Their importance, he says, lies in their form:

What we see unlocks what we cannot see. What we see unlocks the invisible ties and bonds of sympathy that bring us together to become a human community.

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith set out to explain why humans were able to form moral judgements, given our natural inclination towards self-interest. The answer, he found, lay in the visual sense.

Smith decided that it was the sight of observing others which made people aware of themselves and the morality of their own behavior. Knud Haakonssen, the editor of TMS, writes that in Smith’s theory

Society is … the mirror in which one catches sight of oneself, morally speaking.

Brown has consistently argued that the Left can claim Adam Smith just as well as the Right. Here’s another sense in which that is true.