This review first appeared in the New Statesman of 26 April 2013. Because Sir Edward Grey was such a nice man, historians have followed contemporaries in excusing the fact that he was such a disastrous minister: arguably the most incompetent Foreign Secretary of all time for his responsibility in taking Britain into the First World [...]
This book review appeared in The Times on Monday 29 April 2013. Alan Johnson is the nattiest dresser in Labour politics. When I was his junior minister in the Education Department, I would admire the succession of immaculately well cut lightweight suits, pressed shirts, tasteful cufflinks, faultless Windsor-knotted ties and smart shoes. There was never a [...]
This article originally appeared in the January 2013 edition of Prospect magazine In 2009, the Gates Foundation gave out $1.8bn in grants to improve health in developing countries. If it were a state, it would be the world’s 10th largest international aid donor. Its operations certainly resemble a state, complete with an eight acre headquarters [...]
The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy Douglas Carswell Biteback Publishing, 288pp, £12.99 The significance of this book lies not in its predictable right-wing views (“The west is broke; in Britain, America and most of Europe, governments have spent so much that entire countries face bankruptcy,” and so on) but rather in its [...]
Philip Gould: an Unfinished Life Edited by Dennis Kavanagh Palgrave Macmillan, 200pp, £18.99 Friends of the late Philip Gould from across and beyond the political spectrum celebrate his life in this collection of essays edited by Dennis Kavanagh. It is a starry cast, including Alastair Campbell, David Miliband, Peter Mandelson, James Purnell, James Harding and [...]
Originally written for the New Statesman The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Volume IV: The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro, Bodley Head, 736pp, £35 What ultimately matters in politics is what you leave behind. Lyndon Johnson left behind the second most substantial legacy of any US president of the 20th century, after Franklin [...]
Originally written for the Financial Times Going South: Why Britain will have a Third World Economy by 2014, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, Palgrave Macmillan, £14.99 Declinism is back, and this is one of its most brutal and eloquent expressions to date. We aren’t just going through a Great Recession, argue Larry [...]
For the New Statesman He knew he was right The striking thing about this defensive biography of Nick Clegg is how much of it is spent debating whether he is a Conservative. The author, a Liberal Democrat activist, likes his leader a great deal. “Idealism in politics is at stake through the person of Nick [...]
For the New Statesman Democratic dilemmas Vernon Bogdanor questions Nick Clegg’s claim that the coalition’s constitutional reform programme will bring about “the biggest shake-up of our democracy since 1832″. His argument is that while the fact of the coalition’s existence marks a bold change in modern constitutional practice, the programme of political reform set out [...]
For the New Statesman A marriage of true minds David Laws has written a highly informative – as well as highly partisan – account of the days preceding and following the formation of the coalition government this May. The key question is why the Liberal Democrats went with the Conservatives rather than with Labour. To [...]
For Prospect Magazine A Prince among men I am often asked to review books about myself. This is wearisome, but I lift my quill with genuine alarm in this case. I caused my volume The Prince to be published five years after my death, and Brother Powell would have been well advised to do the same. For [...]
For the New Statesman Steve Richards explores and goes some way towards capturing the extraordinary complexity of Gordon Brown, a complexity underappreciated because – as Richards emphasises at the outset of his new book – most journalists who wrote about Blair and Brown were every bit as partisan as their subjects, and propagated the [...]
For the New Statesman Coalition man David Lloyd George was self-created and self-destroyed. His self-destruction, after 13 remarkable years in which he almost single-handedly launched the welfare state and mustered the drive to defeat Germany, can be dated to one fateful act in November 1918. The decision to forge a peacetime coalition with the Conservatives [...]
For the New Statesman The other Iron Lady For all the publicity they attract, very few politicians, even of the first rank, leave much of a mark on society. Shirley Williams is one of the select few to have done so. She will be remembered as an inspirational moral force, one of the first generation [...]
Herbert Asquith mismanaged Ireland and sleepwalked into world war. Little wonder his centenary is neglected April 8th marks the centenary of the start of the Asquith government and one of the 20th century’s longest premierships. That this has gone unremarked may reflect the reserved character of Herbert Henry Asquith himself. But the neglect is not [...]
The story of Britain’s railways is one of chaotic genius in the Victorian era followed by a century of more or less uninterrupted decline. Christian Wolmar charts this history in admirable detail, but succumbs to unwarranted romanticism when it comes to the last days of British Rail This magnificent book tells the tale of the [...]
Conrad Black’s weighty new biography of Richard Nixon portrays him as a “mighty and mythic” figure who made a “dignified exit” after being unfairly hounded from office—a code it’s little trouble to break Conrad Black, writing in what he describes as “very distracting circumstances, as I prepared at the same time to deal with serious [...]
Michael Foot was the great rhetorician of his age. His tirades against government enlivened politics and helped sustain the credibility of parliament. Most politicians vanish from memory as rapidly as the controversies they spin. It is ideas, institutions and rare inspirational individuals that linger, and even the last of these often survive with little reference [...]
In 1994 I asked Roy Jenkins if I could write his biography. By the time he finally agreed, three years later, he was about to embark on his Churchill biography and I was about to start working for Tony Blair. I became witness to a fascinating friendship across the generations between two politicians Roy Jenkins’s [...]