Gordon Brown ‘similar to’ Richard Nixon

Gordon Brown (right) will not be thrilled by the observations of Peter Morgan, who wrote the film Frost/Nixon. Just when the PM is enjoying a minor renaissance in popularity with his handling of the financial crisis, Morgan claims that he can see many similarities between Brown and Richard Nixon (left), the disgraced president behind the 1970s Watergate scandal.

"They are people who are hard to like, people who have complicated emotional inner landscapes, and somehow have had trouble accessing them," Morgan tells the Daily Telegraph. "People will hate me for saying this, but there are emotional similarities between Gordon Brown and Richard Nixon.

"Gordon Brown finds it hard to be liked and yet he's a brilliant man. But people don't warm to him, they don't like him. Tony Blair is liked, and David Frost is liked, because they have a charm - an ease."

Morgan is something of a student of the Brown psyche. He also wrote The Deal, which examined how Tony Blair managed to persuade Brown to let him run for the Labour Party leadership in 1994, thus setting off one of the biggest feuds in modern political history.