GORDON Brown and I are near contemporaries. He was born in 1951; I came along a year later. We share similar upbringings and backgrounds. We were both raised in the east of Scotland — he in Fife, me in the Lothians – at a time when coal mining was still a viable and dominant industry. Our education was state-based and the role of the Church of Scotland was formative. Brown’s father was a minister while mine was a kirk elder and a leader in the Life Boys, membership of which I tend now to think was of critical importance in my formation.

But as I read My Life, Our Times, which purports to be the former prime minister’s autobiography, I grew increasing frustrated and disengaged. Were we really progeny of the same race and place? It’s true that in his opening chapter – “Growing Up” – Brown acknowledges that he did have a childhood but the cursory and colourless manner with which he deals with it suggests that he could hardly wait to move on to meatier matters. To this day, he writes, he remembers as a twelve-year-old the closure of a linoleum factory in Kirkcaldy. We must take his word for it. That was in 1963. What do I remember of that year, apart from my father’s attempt to have me wear short trousers on my first day at secondary school? It is takes no great feat of memory to recall that it was Scotland’s 2-1 defeat of England at Wembley inspired by the likes of Denis Law and Jim Baxter, who scored both our goals, and the jiggery-pokery of the pint-sized magician, Willie Henderson. Bliss it was to be alive at that hour.

This is not to suggest that Brown, a football fan, ignores such indelible boyhood remembrances but they are eclipsed by others less personally imperative. Around the same time I was cheering on one of Scotland’s best-ever elevens, Brown was apparently barracking the new Tory prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who, he says, he heard speak in several Fife villages. “He delivered exactly the same speech wherever he went — something that shocked me then but which I now quite understand.”

Politics was what interested young Brown, and drives him still. He was Edinburgh University’s second student rector, following his chum Jonathan Wills. That was in 1972 and I recall reading with pleasure on the front page of the Edinburgh Evening News stories of the stooshies he had with academe’s stuffed shirts. He ought to have become an MP earlier than he did but he bottled it, declining to contest a seat against George Robertson. Here, he insists, the reason he did not put his name forward was because his father told him not to.

This may well be the case but with Brown one never knows. When, in May 1994, John Smith died, the leadership of the Labour Party was between him and Tony Blair. It is clear that Blair was faster out of the blocks and outmanoeuvred Brown who, he would have us believe, stood aside because his former roommate promised to resign and spend more time with his family during a second term in No 10. Blair may well have intimated such but only someone seriously lacking in imagination could have taken him at face value. My memory of those febrile days – I was by then at the Scotsman – was that support for Brown, even among Scottish MPs, was far from solid.

THESE are examples of what Brown, quoting Robert Frost, may count as roads not taken. Another was when, not long into his tenure as prime minister, he decided not to hold a snap general election which may have given him his own mandate. Whether he would have won or not we will never know. What we do know is that when opportunity knocked he dithered and in so doing severely damaged his reputation.

My Life, Our Times is a curious book. At times it is deeply affecting. Brown’s life has been marked by tragedy. He and his wife, Sarah, lost their daughter, Jennifer, just a few weeks after her premature birth. Their son, Fraser, has cystic fibrosis. Brown himself is blind in one eye and has come perilously close to losing the sight in his good eye. When writing about such things one warms to him and one feels angry on his behalf when he relates how the venal Sun intruded on Fraser. Brown has suffered badly at hands of Rupert Murdoch and his jackals and his continuing bitterness is understandable.

But too many of these pages are concerned with the nuts and bolts of party policy and the helter-skelter of running a country. What might in a more able writer’s hands be compelling is in Brown’s dull and tedious. At the heart of the book is his relationship with Blair but where there ought to be tension and passion and volcanic verbal explosions – all of which, as we know from other sources such as Alastair Campbell’s diaries, were the daily norm in the era of New Labour – there are platitudes, weasel words and page upon page that could have been written by a committee.

This from the man who, with Alistair Darling, saved the nation from financial Armageddon, and whose last-minute intervention persuaded undecideds to vote No in the independence referendum. To paraphrase his high school’s motto, he tried his utmost. Alas, it wasn’t good enough.

My Life, Our Times; by Gordon Brown is published by The Bodley Head, priced £25