Gordon Brown

"Flash Gordon" by Les Gibbard © BBC

His interest in politics began at an early age. His father was a Labour voter and took him to see the misery caused by the flooding of Kirkcaldy in the 1950s when the sea wall broke. When Gordon Brown was 12, he offered to canvass for the Labour party in a by-election at Kinross and Perth. He joined the Labour Party at 18 and went on to become Chairman of the Labour Club at Edinburgh University.

In 1983 Brown entered Parliament for the first time as MP for Dunfermline East, having unsuccessfully contested the seat of Edinburgh South in the general election of 1979. Within four years he had gained his first shadow cabinet post as shadow Chief Secretary of the Treasury. He became Shadow Trade and Industry Secretary in 1989 and in 1992 became Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. He then set about creating the policies on which the 1997 election campaign was based, proposing a windfall tax on excess profits of public utilities in 1993.

"Giving Blair a Leg-Up" by Les Gibbard © BBC

At one point he was widely tipped as a future leader of the Labour party, but after the death of leader John Smith in 1994 he stood aside, agreeing to give Tony Blair a clear run at the leadership in a famous meal at the Granita restaurant in Islington. The two men had entered Parliament in the same year and are said to be close both politically and personally. After the 1997 general election Gordon Brown gave up the right to 11 Downing Street, the traditional residence of the Chancellor and moved into the smaller flat above no 10 so that the Prime Minister's family could take advantage of the space in no 11.

The speed of his actions on becoming Chancellor has earned Mr Brown the nickname "Flash Gordon". Straight on the heels of Labour's election victory he announced that the Bank of England was to become independent of the Government and to have its own powers to make decisions about interest rates. He went on to remove its role as regulator of financial institutions and to announce the creation of a new super regulator to oversee banking, insurance and pensions.

Mr Brown has also introduced a new level of informality and transparency within the Treasury - the National Audit Office has been invited to scrutinise the Treasury's economic forecasting. His decision to wear a lounge suit rather than black tie to the Confederation of British Industry dinner caused a stir amongst the more traditional elements of the financial establishment.

Gordon Brown is unmarried, though there are persistent rumours of engagement to Sarah Macauley, who runs the public relations consultancy Hobsbawm Macauley Communications. His love life was the cause of a run-in with Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs: She said "People want to know whether you're gay or whether there is some flaw in your personality" Brown said in reply "I'm not married because I'm not married. It just hasn't happened yet. It might happen, there have been times...and yes, I've got friends".

He had a five-year relationship with Princess Marguerite of Romania, the eldest daughter of ex-King Michael of Romania, who said a relationship with him was "politics, politics, politics".

Mr Brown is notoriously hard-working. During the election campaign, he is said to have worked an average of 18 hours a day, six days a week after running on a treadmill for an hour each morning. He is blind in one eye after a rugby accident at school and he once put an ice axe through his thigh while hill-climbing with John Smith.