When Gordon Brown came to tea: Inscrutability, chocolate biscuits – and a joke

Gordon Brown showed his humorous side at a tea party. Photograph: Andrew Winning/Reuters

When headteacher Diane Keating got the call last November asking her to skip school for a meeting with a mystery VIP two days later she had no idea what to expect.

"I thought perhaps I would be meeting Ed Balls, but the person who called me said they couldn't tell me who it would be," said Keating, head of St John's infant school in Chatham, Kent.

While she picked out her outfit for the meeting it was all go at Paul Godwin's house nearby. Godwin, Labour leader of Medway council, had been picked to host a tea party with Gordon Brown.

Sworn to secrecy and with two days' notice, Godwin and his wife leaped into action, cleaning their home from top to bottom and rearranging the furniture to accommodate the 20 unnamed guests he was told to expect in addition to the PM. "It was quite a squeeze," he said.

Meanwhile, Gulsharan Sall, assistant to the local Labour MP, Jonathan Shaw, was calling around his contacts trying to assemble 12 of what central command described as "community champions". The lucky dozen included a sixth-former who got 10 A*-C GCSEs and practised martial arts despite a heart murmur, the secretary general of the Bangladeshi Catering Association and a woman from an autism charity.

The Godwins had been told not to worry about refreshments: the party would bring their own. So it was that Sall was dispatched to the local Co-op to buy tea, coffee and chocolate biscuits. "It wasn't a security thing, we just didn't want to put Paul out at all," said Sall.

When Brown arrived the group sat around in a circle and, after brief introductions, asked the prime minister some questions. After Keating told Brown that her school was at risk of closure by the Tory council, Brown ordered Shaw to look into the case and then showed Keating a side of himself he tends to keep hidden from the general public.

"He made a joke!" she said. "It was around the time that he had been criticised for his handwriting after writing to the family of that soldier killed in Afghanistan, and he told me that he had been to one of his sons' parents' evenings recently and the teacher and had said [the child] was doing very well but needed to improve his handwriting. 'That runs in the family,' he said."