Dour. Grim. Downright uninspiring. When Gordon Brown ended a disappointing three years as British prime minister in 2010, few would have credited him as the man most likely to swing a popular vote ever again.
Yet, the former Labour Party leader and 63-year-old Scot has emerged as the oratorical star of Scotland's Better Together campaign, the man most responsible for persuading wavering voters to stick with Great Britain by emphasising why they should be proud to be British.
The issue at stake - the defence of his homeland within the United Kingdom - brought back the passion that his years of government struggle in London had seemed to sap.
His speech to the final anti-independence rally on the eve of Thursday's referendum set social media ablaze with comments that Brown was the man who should have led the pro-union case all along.
Brown "galvanised the campaign. He spoke with authority. He spoke from the heart," said Victoria Honeyman, a politics lecturer at University of Leeds in England.
Ellen Baron, 62, a life-long Labour voter from the Scottish town of Renfrew near Glasgow, said she was certain that Brown had turned the tables on Alex Salmond, the Scottish National Party leader and first minister of the Scottish Parliament, who resigned yesterday.
"Brown is more than a match for Alex Salmond," she said, wishing aloud that Better Together had enlisted him to argue the pro-union side in two television debates last month against Salmond.
"I'm glad he got involved because it added a lot of extra weight to the 'no' side when it looked as though the nationalists were getting somewhere."
In his first comments since the vote, Brown promised in a speech today morning that British leaders would not break their promise to deliver more powers to Scotland. He called for unity and conciliation after the sometimes bitter fight.
"There is a time to fight but there is a time to unite and this is the time for Scotland to unite and see if it can find common purpose and move from the battle ground to the common ground," he said.
Brown said a timetable on more devolution would be followed, vowing that the new "Scotland Act" would be ready by January. He also promised to lead a House of Commons debate on the proposals in October.
He said the eyes of the world are on British leaders to make sure they deliver, and that the proposals could be supported by both the "Yes" and "No" camps in the independence battle.
Political analysts said Brown's bigger role in delivering defeat of the Scottish nationalists was to realize, months before others, that the pro-independence side could win unless Better Together emphasised positive pride in Britain, not fear of how an independent Scotland might stumble.
