- British Foreign Secretary, 1966-1968.
- One of the most prominent figures in the British Labour Party in the 1950s and 1960s, he ran for the leadership of the party against Harold Wilson in 1963 and lost to him; he became one of Wilson's chief colleagues and was Deputy Prime Minister for a time after Wilson's election victory in October of 1964.
- During the years of the Labour Government of 1964-70, it rapidly became known that Brown was an alcoholic whose drinking was out of control, but this was never publicly admitted. The satirical magazine "Private Eye" seized on the phrase "tired and emotional", once used as a euphemism in a press release about him, and employed it constantly, not only about Brown, but about anyone else who appeared in public whilst drunk. The phrase soon entered the language, and its real meaning was known to all.
- Brown once asked a papal nuncio to dance with him at a diplomatic reception. The nuncio was dressed in the full regalia of his office, and Brown drunkenly assumed he was a woman.
- He was the Labour Member of Parliament for the constituency of Belper, in Derbyshire, for almost exactly 25 years, from July of 1945 to June of 1970. After he was defeated in the 1970 General Election, he was elevated to the peerage and became Lord George-Brown.
- He married Sophie Levine in 1937, but left her for another woman (who was some 35 years his junior) in 1982, after 45 years of marriage. There was no divorce, however, and his wife outlived him by five years.
- He joined the Labour Party as a teenager and was for decades among the staunchest and most outspoken of British leftists. But in 1976, he resigned from the party and (like other Labour politicians of 1960s) became a member of the newly-formed Social Democrat Party, or SDP. This party eventually merged with the Liberal Party to become the Liberal Democrat Party.
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