AP News, January 20th, 2007
Britain's likely next prime minister, Gordon Brown, spoke openly on Friday about his ambitions to lead Britain and said he would draw inspiration from former statesmen including Mahatma Gandhi, President Reagan and Winston Churchill.
The current Treasury chief, who will st110and as a candidate to lead the governing Labour Party once Tony Blair leaves his post by September, said in an interview broadcast on Friday he intends to overhaul foreign policy.
Speaking at the end of a three-day visit to India, during which he laid a wreath at a Gandhi memorial in New Delhi, Brown told reporters he wanted to draw inspiration from the Indian leader's attitude during his country's fight for independence.
"What I was talking about was his courage, that he showed a strength of belief and a strength of willpower, a determination to move for a more just and fair order," Brown told the BBC.
However, Brown said he did not support Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence and had no intention of abandoning the use of military force.
He praised the handling of the threat from communism by Reagan and Britain's former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher _ for years vilified by the Labour Party _ saying lessons could be drawn from both.
Brown had previously said that Islamic terrorism posed an equally significant threat to the West as communism had during the Cold War.
The finance chief evoked Britain's revered wartime leader Winston Churchill, claiming he would follow the former prime minister's belief that "you cannot meet the challenges of the future by simply building the present in the image of the past."
Brown said changes were needed to institutions including the U.N. and the World Bank, which had failed to modernize enough since the end of World War II.
