My review of Tom Bower's biography of Lord and Labour Black is in today's Times.

Mark Steyn has a wonderful review of Alistair Cooke's 'magnificently prescient...ruminations about a pre-hyperpower US' here.

Mark Steel is one of a wave of comedians who, to be blunt, aren't very funny. Pretty much interchangeable, their acts and columns seem to consist of variations on the theme of "that Blair bloke, he's more Tory than the Tories". This is usually met with sympathetic, knowing laughter from an audience that goes to hear the "comedian" only because they know and share the politics. There are exceptions - Jeremy Hardy, for instance, is as explicitly political as any, but he is also genuinely funny, as is Rory Bremner, whose show masks a clear political agenda behind its light-entertainment production values.

But it is lamentable - and puzzling - that new Labour, a concept which is almost satirical in its own right, should have failed to produce anything much better than the dismal rantings of most of the left-wing comedians. Mark Steel is one of the worst of the genre. I've yet to read a piece by him that was intentionally amusing. The only one that ever made me laugh was an account of his sacking by the Guardian (he now writes a column in the Independent): what was intended to be a devastating and hilarious attack on the newspaper revealed, in its astonishingly leaden prose and conceit, precisely why the then comment editor decided that he could do without Steel's contributions.

So the concept of "a stand-up history of the French revolution" by a writer such as Steel was, even leaving aside the bizarre concept of a "stand-up history" (whatever that might be), hardly one to relish. I am still no nearer knowing what a "stand-up history" is, beyond a history with some jokes thrown in. But what I can report is that Vive la Revolution is a perfectly readable account of the revolution with - quelle surprise - some pretty limp jokes.

Steel appears to have read widely and then assembled a cut-and-paste account from those writers whose politics match up to his own. Why anyone would want to read the verdict of a bad comedian with an agenda, as opposed to the account of a fine historian with an enviable prose style - such as Simon Schama's Citizens - is a mystery. Steel seems well aware of this problem, and thus begins by trying to dismiss him: "Simon Schama in Citizens tells us that Marat 'made an art form of confrontational ugliness' as 'his eyes were not quite aligned'. After all, modern society would be so much fairer if we reverted to those quaint but effective 11th-century methods of judging people as unacceptable if they lack a symmetrical face."

Sorry, but a few weak jokes do not a dismissal make. And on and on it goes, snide references to historians who have actually had something worthwhile to say beyond "I'm a lefty, ha ha ha". It's not a wholly worthless book. Some of the jokes are mildly amusing - the best being his account of the invention of the guillotine: "introduced as a liberal measure and considered to be more humane than the old methods of execution, of which the most common involved strapping the victim to a water wheel until his back broke. So it's almost certain that when the guillotine was introduced, a French Ann Widdecombe will have complained, 'Doesn't this show that the Jacobins are soft on crime? For if the burglar knows that if he is caught he will merely be beheaded instantly without hours of agony on a water wheel, there is no deterrent whatsoever. Proving once again that Mr Robespierre is the burglar's friend.'"

But since I've just given you more or less the funniest part, I'm not sure why anyone would want to bother with Vive la Revolution. If you've got an A-level to sit, have never read anything about the French revolution and have only two hours to go before the exam, then the book might have something to offer, as it's a perfectly reasonable canter through the events. But if you're looking for jokes and you don't crease up at the description of Camille Desmoulins, who stuttered when he wasn't addressing a crowd, as "the Gareth Gates of the French revolution", then I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed.

The Wages of Spin
Bernard Ingham
John Murray, 288pp, £18.99

There is an important book waiting to be written about the changing relationship between the media and politicians, the difference between spin and information, and the supposed politicisation on the civil service. The Wages of Spin is not that book. It's not an especially badbook, just not a very good one. The first third is a relatively well-written history of political reporting. The rest is a rather dull, self-justificatory account of Ingham's time as Baroness Thatcher's Press Secretary, and a trite, predictable attack on how everything has collapsed since the good old days when Ingham did things properly, with the takeover by those nasty, brutish new Labour types. Yawn.
Ingham has carved out a "blunt Yorkshireman" career since leaving Number Ten, and we know before even opening the book what he's going to say. Let me save you reading the 247 pages and summarise his views on New Labour and spin: there's too much of it. And that's about it.
A large part of his thesis is that, as he puts it, "spin doctors...exercise inordinate influence at the heart of Number Ten and ministerial teams in a government lead by a media-mad Prime Minister. The central power of Campbell was demonstrated by his routine presence at Cabinet meetings (which I never attended)...". The only problem with that accusation is that earlier in the book Ingham has reprinted a memo written by him in 1988 to Sir Nigel Wicks, then Baroness Thatcher's Principal Private Secretary, complaining that "my exclusion from meetings stemmed from a mistaken view of presentation...It would pay enormous dividends if I could attend more of those meetings where an issue is coming to a head and in which presentation is an important matter."
It's fine if Sir Bernard's doing it, but not if it's one of those new Labour chappies. Instead of merely asserting that it's wrong for Campbell to be so deeply embedded at the heart of government, for the Government Information Service to have been politicised, for special advisers to have extended their role in press liaison, and for presentation to have sometimes become indistinguishable from policy making , it would have been far more interesting to ask whether or not Labour's undoubted politicisation is not a more appropriate response to the modern media and political world.
At the most prosaic level, any journalist has experience of how bad some press officers can be. Forget not returning phone calls, which Ingham seems to think is the real "hanging offence", the real problem is that the civil service press officer is rarely happy to go beyond the words contained in a press release or announcement. For anything deeper ? the thinking behind a decision, for instance - one has, more often than not, to talk to a special adviser, who knows and can interpret the ministerial mind because he or she has been chosen directly by the minister to do that job. But put that person alongside - even in charge of - career civil servant press officers and, heh presto, you have committed the unforgivable sin of politicising the civil service.
Focusing on politicisation misses the point. The real issue is trustworthiness and competence. Every journalist has their own list of special advisers who are worth talking to because they understand the issues, they are - up to a point - frank about the politics, and their spin is within the bounds of reliability. And correspondingly, we all know who is unreliable, who will tell porkies for short term gain, and who is, in the end, untrustworthy. They get found out. The good ones know it, and don't do it. The bad ones do, and it backfires on them.
But the real issue goes far beyond press officers and spin, and goes to the very role of the civil service. Ministers are, as Sir Robin Day put it to Sir John Nott, "here today, gone tomorrow". The department remains, no matter which ephemeral figure happens to be its titular head. Special advisers are, as governments of all persuasion long ago recognised, an essential tool for a minister. There are special advisers - political appointees, shock horror - who really do specially advise on policy, who don't deal with the press, who play a straight bat when they meet journalists and who simply get on with their job. But we rarely hear about them because there's no story in "Minister Advised What To Do By Trusted Ally Shock".
One Cabinet minister told me recently that, on assuming office, he asked his department to implement a manifesto pledge. "I'm afraid, minister," he was told, "that goes against departmental policy". Is that really the world we want to preserve?

This will not be an unbiased review. The first two volumes of Robert Caro's biography of LBJ were astonishing in their sweep, magisterial and gripping, and I have waited impatiently almost twelve years for Volume Three. To say it is not disappointing is to be guilty of almost criminal understatement. As if it was possible, Master of the Senate takes what was already an outstanding multi-volume series onto a still higher plane. It is, quite simply, the finest biography I have ever read, or could ever imagine reading. It is more than that: it is one of the finest works of literature I have ever come across, or ever hope to.
It has taken Caro three decades to research the critical aspects of LBJ's life - longer than it did his subject to live it. Such depth of knowledge, spread across so many words - a million so far, and we have yet even to reach his 1960 Presidential bid - would normally mean only that every triviality was written up, making for tedious prolixity. The opposite is true: Caro is so in command of his research, and has so much to say, that not a word is wasted. It has been thirty years well spent.
But the chronological aspect of Master of the Senate is almost the least important. What lifts it to great literature is that it is also a meditation on power, on the nature of leadership, on human relations - and, taken with the first two volumes, a history of America in the twentieth century.
LBJ was a shit. He was corrupt to his core, a liar, a megalomaniac, a misogynist, a bully and, like most bullies, a coward. He would urinate into his wash basin in front of secretaries and then wiggle his penis around; he barked orders to aides whilst defecating. He would grab hold of women's thighs in the presence of his wife, Lady Bird.
He was also, with FDR and Reagan, one of the three most important Presidents of the twentieth century. (LBJ himself was responsible for initializing his name, in a conscious effort to suggest comparison with FDR). He changed the lives of hundreds of millions of black Americans for the better, with a record of outstanding achievement which shows up how inconsequential were both his predecessor, JFK, and his successor, Nixon. Were it not for the endings to their Presidencies, neither would be remembered as more than lacklustre. Yet most people know almost nothing about Lyndon Johnson other than the manner of his elevation to the Presidency, and the catastrophe of Vietnam.
Volume Three stops before his first run at the Presidency in 1960, yet already shows why he deserves the label great. The Senate had for generations been the main obstacle to civil rights, with confederate Democrats ensuring that blacks were not given the vote. LBJ seized hold of the position of Majority Leader, turning what had withered into a non-job into a position of unrivalled Congressional power. Caro begins with a scintillating history of the Senate, which is worth the £30 alone, and which puts LBJ's political achievement into historical perspective. Indeed, his account of LBJ's rise within the Senate is not simply about the accumulation of power but about how human beings tick. As Caro puts it: "He seemed to sense each man's price and the commodity he preferred as coin".
The crux of the book is the civil rights legislation which he pushed through, managing what no one had thought possible given the unchanged Senate membership. The fundamental issue raised by Master of the Senate is thus: can a good deed be done for base motives? Indeed, can a good deed only be made possible by base behaviour? LBJ was not interested in civil rights as a cause. As with everything else in his life, his use of civil rights was entirely political. No Southerner could be elected President whilst the South was still a cess-pit of reaction. So he turned his energies and skills to removing that blockage to his prospects. But even if his motives had been pure, he would never have been able to succeed without using his every base political skill, from the lies to the bullying to the sycophancy to the corruption.
Would we ever want to see a figure like LBJ in power again? The man was an unspeakably awful human being: a monster. But the question is impossible to answer. His epitaph could say, quite accurately, "He did good". What a trade-off: on the one hand, hundreds of millions benefited from his actions; on the other, he was a beast to his colleagues, stole his election to the Senate, and his behaviour represents everything bad in human affairs.
If you only read one book this year, make it Master of the Senate. I can think of no praise which would be too high for it. In literature, less is, usually, more. Caro's three volumes and million words so far show that, sometimes, more is more.
The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 3:
Master of the Senate
Robert Caro
Jonathan Cape, £30
1202 pp

I cannot remember feeling pain before when reading a book. Boredom, yes. Annoyance, yes. But not real, physical pain. Pariah, however, is so turgid, so overwritten, so trite, so predictable and above all so deeply, deeply pointless that as I forced myself through yet another of its 170 pages (one hundred and seventy: it doesn't sound a lot but, trust me, it makes Clarissa feel like a sprint) I began to ache, and not just in my head.
For some reason, Tom Nairn has something of a reputation as a polemicist. A prerequisite, one would have thought, is the ability to write sentences which carry the reader along rather than shudder in horror. This is a typical Nairn paragraph:
"Now shorn of overseas territories, the outreach of a revived commercial imperium of course sought the maximum in prestige and post-colonial standing. Being placed 'in the sun' and salient on the world stage does remain quite important to capital of this kind. It was not eclipsed by the loss of India, and certainly not by the crocodile tears of the Hong Kong withdrawal in 1998. The fundamental role of the United Kingdom state and its ideology, Britishness, is to hold eclipse in that sense at bay. A measure of democracy has come to be required for that task - but only the clinical minimum dosage recently praised by Prof Eric Hobsbawm, in an essay just before the election".
Are you still here? What does that mean? There is no context, no explanation. Capital of what kind? What is Britishness as an ideology? What is the clinical minimum dosage of democracy? Nairn certainly doesn't make it clear, and I'm afraid I really can't be bothered to find out.
Nairn's thesis, such as it is possible to discern in the midst of his repetitive verbal ticks, is that - yawn - "Britain has actually ceased to exist". Well, well, just what we need - another book on 'whither Britain'. Nairn at least has the virtue of making no bones about hating his country, or 'Britain', as he refers to it. (His most irritating habit is putting words in inverted commas. There is barely a sentence without one: he talks of the Tory 'recovery' in 1979, of how devolution was meant to offer voters a new 'voice', of the conclusion of the devolution 'process'. Why the inverted commas? As my teacher used to say: it isn't funny, and it isn't clever.)
According to Nairn (sorry to inflict more on you): "Central constitutional change is not really resisted in Ukania (yet another Nairn annoyance is his reference to Ukania, at no point explained) because it is 'boring' (here we go again with the inverted commas) or unwanted by Middle England. With comparatively little effort the public-relations apparatus now at the disposal of UK governments could make it a key part of 'modernisation' (phew, twenty seven words without an inverted comma; I was getting worried), rejuvenation (and so on). It is refused because this might mean an identity-switch: dropping the national narratives of British keystone, greatness and leadership. Not knowing which 'Britain' (twenty seven words again - not that Nairn is predicatble) it is to stand up for, the politico-cultural elite would lose its adrenalin overnight. It would find itself merely in charge, not command, of a pretty ordinary collection of archipelago lands".
At one point he casually drops in his prescription for our supposed ills: "The future of the archipelago lies inÖa collection of (relatively) small independent or near-independent states, eight or nine in number, with a collective mutual interest in good relations, and a variety of common links to the European UnionÖ". Gee, Tom; thanks. I'll get my passport application ready. I look forward to living in the People's European Republic of West Mercia.
Nairn simply hates Britain (oops, 'Britain'). He sneers at Tony Blair for saying, after the Nice Summit, that he fought to "get the best out of Europe for Britain and exercise real authority and influence in Europe. Britain is a world power." Nairn is so suffused with contempt for Britain and the British that he doesn't even bother explain why he so objects to Blair's formulation, as if the Prime Minister's words are so laughable that they do the job for him. Sorry; they make your friends on the New Left Review squirm, but to the rest of us they are unexceptional.
Please, please don't look at this book. With one in five of the adult population functionally illiterate, 'Britain' can't afford to lose any of those of us who can read, and if you start Pariah you may, like me, start losing the will to live.
That said, Pariah has one use. Reading it, I learnt how to control my pain, an exercise which I hope to be able to repeat next time I visit the dentist.
Pariah - Misfortunes of the British Kingdom
Tom Nairn
Verso, 176 pages
£13

Leos Janacek was the greatest opera composer of the twentieth century, and arguably the greatest composer, period. Leave aside all other considerations, his operas pass one key test: they are performer proof. Just as a poor performance of Don Giovanni or the Marriage of Figaro can nonetheless still give much pleasure, it's also true that, whilst a great performance of Katya Kabanova or Jenufa is emotionally shattering, a poor performance can also be transcendental, such is the power of Janacek's ability to blend story and music. His gift was to be able to take a powerful story and make it better by honing in on the most powerful and truthful elements. Shakespeare's Othello may be a masterpiece, but Verdi's Otello, the essence of that masterpiece, is if anything a still greater work. So Janacek's From the House of the Dead takes Dostoyevsky's silver and turns it into gold.
Today it seems almost inconceivable that it took us so long to discover Janacek, and that it is only in the past fifty years or so that his operas have become part of the repertoire. If it had not been for the efforts of Sir Charles Mackerras, the greatest Janacek conductor of our age, it would have taken even longer, and audiences would have been denied access to a string of blazing masterpieces.
Reading Mirka Zemanova's biography, perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised. It took until 1916, when he was 61, for Janacek to have anything resembling a success with the premier of Jenufa. Just two years before Czech independence, one might have thought, given the nationalist climate and the avowed and obvious Czech identity of Janacek's work, that such a success, even at the age of 61, would have given him the acclaim his music merited. Not so. Janacek had been ignored throughout his life by the Prague chattering classes as a country hick and no more than a workmanlike composer, and they weren't going to change their minds after one triumph. But such was the sheer weight of masterpieces which poured out over the next decade - the likes of Katya Kabanova, The Makropoulos Affair and The Cunning Little Vixen - that eventually they were forced, grudgingly, to acknowledge that he was more than a musical hack.
Zemanova leaves musicology to others, and concentrates on the life. What emerges most clearly is that, great composer as he was, Janacek was also a first class shit. He seems not to have had the slightest care for the way he treated others. As a young man he had to leave Vienna, where he had been studying, because his pieces were held to be beneath the required standard of entry to the all-important Conservatoire competition. For the next forty years or so he eked out an existence as a provincial music teacher. Zemanova wisely ignores cod psychology, but his frustrations are surely one plausible explanation as to why he was such an awful man and behaved so badly. At 25, for instance, he fell in love with one of his music pupils, Zdenka, who was just 14. He married her two years later and then almost immediately decided that he no longer loved her and effectively ignored her, as well as their child, for the rest of his life. He conducted a series of affairs and made no attempt to conceal them from Zdenka. A year after his Jenufa triumph he started sleeping with a singer 24 years his junior. Zdenka then tried to kill herself and, while she was recovering in hospital, he went on holiday, from where he wrote to Zdenka suggesting that, since his mistress would be passing their home in Brno on her way to join him on his holiday, she might spend a night at that home.
He then became infatuated with a 35-year old, who remained his obsession until his death in 1928. One night he suggested to Zdenka that the three of them go to the opera together, and that she should pose as his mistress' mother "who had", as he charmingly put it, "passed on everything beautiful to her daughter".
One long-standing criticism which can now be seen to be entirely wrong has been that Janacek's operas are too literal, and lend themselves only to one style of interpretation - as naturalistic and text-bound as possible. Nikolaus Lehnhoff's ground breaking (and continuing) series of productions at Glyndebourne has shown that they are works which are indeed greater than any performer is capable of demonstrating and which can respond to any amount of 'produceritis'.
The great pianist Artur Schnabel described Mozart's sonatas as "too easy for beginners, too difficult for artists". A similar sentiment applies to Janacek's operas.
Janacek
Mirka Zemanova
John Murray, £25

"Knock, knock." "Who's there?" "Mo." "Mo who?" "Politics is a cruel business."
Remember Mo Mowlam? She used to be the most popular politician in the country. Admittedly, that could be damning with faint praise, but she was indeed the people's Mo. When she announced that she was leaving the House of Commons, there may not have been weeping in the streets, but there was still a pretty universal sense of a great talent gone to waste. She is still, after all, relatively young (she was born in 1949) and might have expected a good few more years near the very top.
Instead, she is now remembered, if at all, for having plunged, in what seemed like a matter of weeks, from being Labour's greatest asset to being its most embarrassing problem, and the victim of a series of pretty foul briefings. Indeed, the reaction to her memoirs has been overwhelmingly hostile. Until I read Momentum, I assumed much of that was due to the combination of her taking the Daily Mail's shilling - an unforgivable sin among most of the left-liberal chattering classes - and . . . well, and what? The Mo Mowlam story, and the hostility that her name now provokes, remains an enigma. Many of her former political friends now openly despise her, and I've always found it difficult to pin down quite why. None of the accusations that were most commonly levelled against her when she was in office - that she had little grasp of necessary detail, that she believed her own popularity myth - is worse than the personality defects of almost any politician. None of them explains the venomous comments of some of her colleagues.
Misogyny certainly provides a partial explanation. Next time you find yourself in the company of a genuine new Labour man (he should be under 25), wonder aloud why it is that there are so few women in top positions. I guarantee that the response will be a variation on the theme of "there aren't enough good women around". Try it and see.
In September 2000, after being given yet another briefing against Mowlam by one of the "kids" (the sharp-suited researchers, advisers and lobbyists who have chosen to make their careers in the Labour Party - their generation's equivalent of the 1980s Tory Boys), I wrote a piece arguing that a misogynist streak was integral to the psyche of many new Labour types. Spend any time in their company and you soon start to hear how Ms So-and-so is "thick", how Mrs Whatshername has "made her career horizontally", and how Ms Thingummy is "a total bitch". The afternoon after my piece appeared, I was at a seminar held by a Westminster think-tank. I was approached conspiratorially not once, not twice, but three times by kids, each of whom said more or less the same thing to me: it's not misogyny, not at all. They really are thick. Another telephoned me to tell me why I was wrong. "Look at Harriet Harman. She's fine on TV, but give her a real job to do and she just can't cope. Over-promoted."
Take Mo Mowlam herself. Have you ever heard her described as Dr Mowlam? But the abuse that was directed against her was far, far worse than ignoring her academic qualifications. In February 2000, the Independent on Sunday led with a story about how its political correspondent had been told that Mowlam's brain tumour had left her "without the intellectual rigour" to do her job: "The illness appears to have affected her. She doesn't seem to be able to do the job in the same way."
The sheer poison of the invective against her was, and remains, breathtaking. It was unrelenting. But reading Momentum, it becomes a lot clearer why she became so hated by her colleagues. Mo Mowlam is a monumental egomaniac. You would, it's true, be hard put to find a half-decent politician who didn't think himself or herself the answer to the country's problems. But the scale of Mowlam's conceit would embarrass most others.
She writes of how badly she was treated by Tony Blair. Having been forced out of Northern Ireland to make way for Peter Mandelson, she was dumped into a non-job at the Cabinet Office. Without a hint of irony, she tells us that she had been to see the Prime Minister to discuss her next position: "He wanted me to take a big spending department, such as Education or Health . . . I felt that going to a big spending department would be like going out of the frying pan into the fire . . . I would like a go at [Defence Secretary] and that would put me in a good place to try later on in my political career for Foreign Secretary . . . He wanted to give me Health . . . He started arguing it was my duty to him as the PM, to the party and to the country to do what he wanted to enable Labour to get a second term. The trouble was that these arguments no longer had any effect."
Er, hold on. Two of the biggest jobs in government weren't to her fancy, so she issued her own demands to the Prime Minister. She couldn't give a damn about working for Labour's second term, so long as she had a fun job. If this is what she is prepared to write for public consumption, what on earth was she like in private? She is so lacking in self-awareness that she doubtless has no idea that the only person to emerge from her account with credit is the supposed villain of the piece, Tony Blair, who not only indulged her, but did everything he could to keep her in government.
This is a sad book. I have always been on Mowlam's side, nauseated by the tone of many of the comments made about her. But even though the specific content of such comments may have been unjustified, the picture which emerges from her own hand is of a politician so wrapped up in self-importance that she deserves not sympathy, but scorn.
Momentum
Mo Mowlam Hodder & Stoughton, 398pp, £20
ISBN 0340793945

In Decemember 2000, The Guardian reported on its front page that Chris Woodhead, the former Chief Inspector of Schools, was about to be appointed Shadow Education Secretary and given a Conservative peerage. The story was, of course, wrong in every respect. But it's easy to see why the Guardian thought that it might be true, since it rested on an assumption taken as axiomatic by most of its readers - that, with his views on education, Mr Woodhead was a not-so-closet Conservative. In that respect, in tying together its favourite bogeymen it was the Guardian's equivalent of a tabloid's Black Disabled Lesbian Vicar In Royal Paedophile Cover Up.
It's easy to forget that Tony Blair's greatest single achievement as Leader of the Opposition was to make it possible for himself to say that his top three priorities were "education, education and education" without being met by a cacophony of derisive laughter. Labour's record in education had up to that point been, for the entire post-war period, shameful, willfully destroying good schools in pursuit of an ideologically driven obsession with the comprehensive and mixed ability teaching. (The same, of course, holds true for the Tories: as Education Secretary, Baroness Thatcher closed more grammar schools than any of her Labour equivalents.)
To shift the parameters of the debate so that Labour was associated not with the likes of Islington schools but with a determination to secure high standards was a remarkable transformation which played a key part in creating the climate which made the 1997 landslide possible. But the achievement was not just Tony Blair's. It would not have been possible without David Blunkett. But without a third figure it would all have been talk. The single most important element in this transformation was when Messrs Blair and Blunkett confirmed that they would keep Chris Woodhead on as Chief Inspector.
Chris Woodhead was probably the most misunderstood public figure of the past decade. Mention his name to most teachers and they still come out in a rash. Mention it now to ministers and advisers and the effect is much the same. But what was it that he was trying to do, which made him so unpopular with teachers and so easily traduced as a Tory? As Class War shows, Woodhead has only ever been driven by a passion for education - and for teaching. It is a sign of how warped the debate on education in this country has become, and how pernicious the influence of the NUT and the education establishment remains, that a man who sought only to root out failure and to praise success should have become so reviled.
As Woodhead points out, in 1955 10 per cent of candidates achieved five or more good O level grades. In 2001, the percentage gaining GCSE grades A*-C was 49.8. Either pupils are now that much cleverer than they were or the teaching that much better in its practical effects. Or, just possibly, the exams are easier. Revealing that the Emperor's new clothes do not exist is never popular, but unless we are to continue living in the land of make believe, someone has to do it. It's not going to be politicians, because they only want to enjoy success. It ought to be teachers, because they are the professionals; but those who speak out are almost always ostracised. Take what happened last year to Jeffrey Robinson, the Principal Examiner for the previous sixteen years in mathematics for the OCR exam board. In 1950 the maths pass rate was 22 per cent. In 1985, the last year of O levels, it had risen to 25 per cent, of a par. Since the introduction of GCSE in 1986, the percentage achieving a C grade (the equivalent of an O level pass) has more than doubled to 55%. Mr Robinson had the temerity to explain why: "The marks required to pass at each of the seven grades (A to G) have been steadily lowered during the nineties". In 1989 the mark needed for a C grade in the Higher level paper was 48 per cent, in 2000 18 per cent. It is almost literally incredible - one can now pass a maths exam by getting 82 per cent of the paper wrong. The response to Mr Robinson's honesty was oh-so predictable: according to Doug MacAvoy of the NUT, "is it about time the moaners and groaners accepted that examinations are not getting any easier"; from ministers the ritual congratulations to hard working students; and from the exam board, the statement that "improvements in grades are a consequence of hard work and better preparation". Better to delude ourselves than to confront reality.
Early last year, Woodhead wrote a series of articles for the Daily Telegraph that were so full of bile, attacking almost everything in the government's education agenda, that they were counter-productive. They were easily dismissed as prompted more by his own frustrations and failures than by a sober desire to effect change for the good. Class War is different. For all his anger and scornful tone towards the nonsense peddled by so many educationalists, it almost impossible for a reader whose thought processes have not been taken over by the drivel that pours forth from the educational establishment, not to see what is wrong. Class War is full of examples, which are unfortunately far from unusual. John MacBeath, for instance, Professor of Education at Cambridge, no less, holds that, rather than teaching being about transmitting knowledge from one generation to the next, "we now know that learning does not work like thatÖFar from thinking coming after knowledge, knowledge comes on the coat tails of thinkingÖtherefore, instead of knowledge-centred schools we need thinking centred schools". As Woodhead writes: "It is pathetic. Of course the acquisition of knowledge involves thought. MacBeath confuses the pursuit of knowledge with the inculcation of factÖWhat hope is there for state education when the academic who holds one of the two or three most prestigious posts in teacher education can write such twaddle?". Woodhead's book will no doubt be panned by the usual suspects. But it is they who have got us into the mess that, even after the beneficial effects of the literacy and numeracy strategies, a quarter of primary school pupils still cannot read and write when they move to their secondary school. Woodhead should be proud that he has spent the past decade trying to get us out of the mess.

Class War: The State of British Education
Chris Woodhead, Little Brown, £14.99

Whatever else Philip Collins does with his life, he has managed at least one unique feat - combining the words ëthink tank director' and ënovelist' on his CV. Having spent most of my adult life in or around think tanks, the thought of reading a novel by most of the people I work with would normally fill me not so much with dread as with a very profound longing for alcohol, or something else to numb the pain. Statistics and wonkery do not a novel make. It's not least of the achievements of Philip Collins, Director of the Social Market Foundation, the uber-Blairite think tank, that his book does not read as if it has been published by the SMF. I didn't spot a single statistic or policy proposal. Maybe they were all excised after his first draft.
In fact, Collins has managed to pull off a neat trick. He has written a book which can be read on at least two levels - as the latest contribution to the ëhow men think' genre, and as a piece of neo-Dickensian social commentary, albeit with a narrow focus.
The Men From The Boys is the story of Adam and Kevin, who are neighbours on a Bolton council estate. Although they are best friends and blood brothers (Collins is particularly good on such peculiar boyish rites), Adam is bookish whilst Kevin is a gifted footballer. Collins charts their lives over a generation. The plot is obvious almost from the first page, so it's not giving much away to say that, whilst Adam enjoys the classic ëpoor boy made good' success, Kevin's life falls apart. Given that Collins is clearly writing a book not so much about Adam and Kevin but about class, fortune and social mobility, it would be easy for The Men From The Boys to be painfully didactic, the characters mere mouthpieces for Collins' purpose. They aren't. Nor are they mere archetypes. They are recognizable, yes. But they live. Even though I knew what was going to happen next - when has a book about two life-long friends not involved one succeeding and the other failing, with a twist at the end? - I still wanted to see how they reacted, and what they had to say. I kept turning the pages.
Collins' theme - how we are now what we once were, no matter how far we travel, physically and emotionally - remains as true today as ever. The statistics so thankfully absent from the book show that, as general rule, where we are born on the social scale is far and away the most important predictor of where we will die. Education is, of course, the one thing which can really change that. But because today's state education, especially in poor areas and the inner cities, is so dreadful, we have become far less socially mobile a society than we were. The story for much of the twentieth century was one of gradual improvement, with working class children being offered an escape by the grammar school. The snuffing out of that option, by the ideologically driven determination to replace grammar schools with comprehensives, was a quite explicit piece of social engineering. As such, it has been hugely influential - but in precisely the opposite way to that intended. Instead of promoting mobility, the decline in standards brought about by the deadly combination of monolithic comprehensives and supposedly progressive teaching has made class divisions even more pronounced. Today, more than at any point in the past 75 years, where you are born once again predicts where you will end up.
The Men From The Boys is, inevitably, blokish. The women are McGuffins, whose impact is little more than as ciphers for the story of Adam and Kevin. That said, Collins is particularly acute in his depiction of the breakdown of Adam's relationship.
The Men From The Boys suffers, inevitably, from the besetting fault of most ëmale angst' novels - it is written from a decidedly middle class perspective. Even though it goes out of its way to be about two working class lads, the heart of the book is how one of them copes with joining the middle class, and how the other copes with not doing so. But then Collins is middle class, as will be most of his readers. There's nothing wrong with writing from a position of knowledge. Especially if you run a think tank.
The Men From The Boys
Phil Collins
Harper Collins, £14.99
ISBN 0 00 712617 4

A couple of weeks ago I heard someone say that we should feel sorry for Jim Naughtie. His book, The Rivals - the Intimate Story of a Political Marriage (Fourth Estate), has been the great turkey of the publishing year: a Heaven's Gate for the commentariat. Fourth Estate, the publisher, thought they were on to a guaranteed winner: the inside story, based on "unique access" (as the publishers put it) to the main participants, of "the most enduring, complex and important relationship in recent times" written by, as one rival author put it to me, "the ultimate establishment hack". Royally hyped for the past couple of years, it is already, within three months of publication, a gargantuan flop of legendary proportions.
We should feel sorry for Naughtie, the chap said, because he had the misfortune to be published immediately after 11th September. ëPoor chap', I was told; ëit never stood a chance'.
Hmm. Poor chap, indeed. I could do with such misfortune. His advance, depending on which source you believe, was between £300,000 and £350,000. So no one bought it; big deal, as Naughtie's bank manager no doubt put it. He should care.
But I bet he does care. I've never been offered even a tenth of Naughtie's advance (yet, I like to thinkÖ). But even if you write a book just for the money, you still want it to be read. Especially if, as the main presenter on the Today programme, you hold one of the most important positions in the chattering class firmament, and before that were one of the most respected political writers of your time.
So what went wrong?
It's impossible to get details of the number of copies sold. Not surprisingly, his publisher, Fourth Estate, refused to confirm any figures. But let's put it this way. When Jim Naughtie's word processor gave a party, no one came. Despite the fact that every bookshop one walks into seems to have copies staring out from everywhere, no one I know has bought a copy or knows of anyone who has. And if the sad political obsessives I hang out with don't have it, it's difficult to think of anyone who would, since it received almost no coverage beyond a smattering of the obligatory reviews.
Not because there's no market for political books. The astonishing success of Andrew Rawnsley's Servants of the People, which was in the top 10 (non fiction) best sellers in both hardback and paperback, and sold well into six figures, shows that. As, on a smaller scale, does Jo-Anne Nadler's biography of William Hague. Hardly the most propitious of subjects, it had - unlike The Rivals - a sensible print run of 5000 which it more or less sold out. Everyone was happy.
Forget 11th September. The real reason why The Rivals has been and gone without leaving any kind of shadow is because - there's no way round this - the book is plain dull. And it's dull because there's nothing of any interest in it that isn't in Servants of the People. (Well, there's one thing: a rather good Alastair Campbell story, which has his son telling him: "You want a good soundbite? Here's one - you're a crap dad".) There are also too many factual errors, such as repeating the notion that Campbell keeps a diary ("my pension", as he supposedly calls it). After Peter Oborne made the same claim in his biography, Campbell went ballistic and flatly denied keeping any sort of diary. Unless he is a barefaced liar, the story is plain wrong.
The quality of Jim Naughtie's contacts is peerless. He counts, for instance, the Prime Minister amongst his friends, and has an annual dinner with Mr Blair on the eve of Labour Party conference. But good contacts is one thing; genuine friendship can bring its own problems. As one senior political commentator put it to me: "Rawnsley is good at getting inside the establishment, but Naughtie (ital)is(ital) the establishment. And their books give that away. Rawnsley betrays everything his sources tell him, and they keep coming back for more. Naughtie doesn't want to upset his friends, and my God it shows. I literally fell asleep reading it".
When I asked a (thoroughly unscientific but thoroughly representative) sample of Press Gallery members what they thought of the book, not one of them could offer a word of praise. The word which kept cropping up was "boring". As one put it: "I honestly can't remember a word of it".
So Naughtie got £300,000 for a glorified cuttings job. Good luck to him. But there's a story here which goes beyond the merits or otherwise of his book. Andrew Rawnsley's book is far from perfect - details of conversations as if taken from transcripts which can't possibly be wholly accurate, and the breathless style of a bonkbuster novel. But with chapter and verse of every major government decision and intrigue, he not only ensured that The Rivals will end up as stove feed, he can genuinely claim to have turned the course of history. Just as the monarchy was never the same after Andrew Morton, so politics hasn't been the same since Andrew Rawnsley. It's easy to forget what we knew about New Labour before Rawnsley. We knew there were feuds and chaos, and we knew isolated stories. But Rawnsley gave us the big picture, and filled in the gaps. The problem is what's left. Time moves on, of course, and we need the inside story of the latest events. But so much do we now know about the personality battles across the government and, especially, the ëTeeBeeGeeBees', as the Blair-Brown feud is now known, that the latest daily instalments barely cause a ripple. On Breakfast with Frost on 1st December, Gordon Brown refused to deny that the existence of his fabled agreement with Tony Blair for the Prime Minister to stand down and let the Chancellor have his turn as PM. What a story! But it barely made page two of the following day's papers. Thanks to Rawnsley, it's all a big yawn now. Been there. Done that.

Twenty years ago, it seemed as if there would be no ënext generation' of great conductors. Although the baton had passed seamlessly from the pre-war generation of Willhem Furtwangler, Bruno Walter and Eric Kleiber to their successors, the likes of Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein and Carlo Maria Giulini, the generation below them looked, in comparison, pygmies. There were no more greats, and we seemed condemned to live in an age where an ability to beat time properly was the best we could hope for.
It was no wonder that this fallow period coincided with the rise of the ëauthentic instrument' brigade, many of whose early adherents made a supposed virtue of time beating: the time they beat, they claimed, was more authentic than that of traditional conductors.
How bizarre that fear seems today. The likes of Valery Gergiev, Maris Jansons and Christian Theilemann stand comparison with the best in history, as anyone who has experienced the sheer excitement of their concerts will surely agree. Gergiev is incapable of the dull or routine phrase. Indeed, even a conductor such as Sir Colin Davis, who for years was taken for granted here in his home country, is now getting the recognition he deserves as one of the most transcendent musicians on the planet.
It is thus a sign of just how great a figure is Sir Simon Rattle that even amongst so many wonderfully gifted peers, his is the talent which is genuinely unique. Most conductors specialize in one, maybe two, areas of the repertory - and are no less worthwhile for that. Just as marathon runners do not also compete in 100 metre sprints, so one may long to hear Gergiev in nineteenth and twentieth century music - but not in Bach or Mozart. A very few - Furtwangler and Walter, for instance - have been equally adept in every area. Rattle too appears to have no limitations; whether it is baroque, classical or modern (he has even recorded Duke Ellington), he is utterly at ease, and equally outstanding.
As is clear from Nicholas Kenyon's admirably straightforward and readable book - as he puts it, journalism rather than biography or history - Rattle's very different musical self-education is in large measure responsible for the his musical sweep. Most conductors begin with the classics - Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, perhaps Bach - and gradually move into later pieces - Mahler, and perhaps other twentieth century greats such as Bartok, Shostakovich and Britten. Rattle has developed in precisely the opposite way. As a precocious schoolboy he put together scratch performances of Mahler and learned to love twentieth century music. As a developing professional he moved backwards, only very gradually gaining his confidence in the classical repertory of Mozart and Beethoven as time, and performances, went on. His first Beethoven symphony recording was, incredibly, only released this summer.
Rattle is unique in having something - not just something, but something wonderful - to offer across the board. But he is also unique in another respect: whilst there are other conductors, such as Sir John Eliot Gardiner and Sir Roger Norrington, who work with both ëauthentic' and traditional orchestras, none synthesize the styles so well. Rattle's work with the authentic instrument Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is more often than not sensational. He manages to bring the best of both worlds together - combining the refreshing, different sound world with a proper interpretation, rather than the glorified run through of the score which is the usual fare of the authentic brigade. I count his concert performance of Mozart's Idomeneo some fifteen years ago, and a recent Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, both with authentic instruments, as amongst the highlights of my concert-going life. Add to that a Parsifal, any number of Mahler performances and a Haydn oratorio with traditional orchestras and you get the drift of his astonishing range.
Unlike most wunderkinds, who usually decline into dull middle age, Rattle is already a great, but a great who - without losing the vigour - is clearly maturing with every performance. The thought of what he might do over the next twenty or thirty years is mouth-watering - all the more so now that he is about to launch on a new phase as musical director of the Berlin Philharmonic.

Simon Rattle - From Birmingham to Berlin
Nicholas Kenyon
Faber £20 358 pp

After four years in government, only two Labour ministers have emerged with reputations significantly higher than in 1997: David Blunkett and Jack Straw. The Prime Minister and Chancellor could hardly have started with higher reputations but Messrs Straw and Blunkett were widely regarded as, in the first case, worthy but dull and, in the second, popular but limited. The roots of this condescending attitude to the Foreign Secretary are something of a puzzle: in opposition he was consistently one of the most thoughtful and provocative shadow ministers, from his espousal of school standards and regular testing as Shadow Education Secretary in the late 1980s, long before such ideas were remotely acceptable to most on the left, to his 1993 pamphlet (which provoked John Smith to apoplexy) arguing that Clause IV should be abolished.
David Blunkett has always had to battle against condescension. His book On A Clear Day (now sadly out of print) is one of the better examples of political autobiography, as far from the usual turgid self-justification as imaginable, and instead a simple, almost matter of fact (and all the more moving for that) description of his background, of his father's horrific and drawn out death after falling into a vat of boiling water, his family's subsequent fall into penury, and of the low expectations against which he has had to battle to varying degrees all his life.
Blunkett has never been as easy to pigeon-hole as his labeling as a 'loony left' council leader in the 1980s tried to insist. For one thing, he was pivotal in Labour's expulsion of Militant. And on many issues he has always been instinctively conservative. When asked about the British Council's tour of Mark Ravenhill's plays, Shopping and Fucking, Blunkett replied that "I don't know how much they are spending. But if they are spending a penny on it, it's a penny too much." The play was "full of foul language. Shakespeare didn't need that, did he?".
Again, on the bread and butter issues the core of his beliefs has always been far more subtle than the traditional left response to poverty. As leader of Sheffield, he made some woefully misguided mistakes and defended some pretty indefensible policies, but even then he was trying to give practical effect to, as the sound bite has it, a hand up not a hand out. Nothing better illustrates his approach, then and now, than this description from On A Clear Day of his own poverty: "I do not use the term lightly. Those who have never experienced real poverty are all too often sentimental about it and about poor people in general. I have to smile at this and think if only you knew what it was like, you would know all about aspirations and expectations and why it was that, in the community in which I grew up, escaping the poverty trap and achieving success were they key aims".
Blunkett's career is a metaphor for Labour itself. In the early 1980s he was regarded by all but his party allies as a dangerous left winger with disastrous policy prescriptions. Over the past twenty years he has learned from his mistakes, realised the importance of both means and ends and grasped the way the majority of his country think and behave, to such an extent that he, more than anyone except Tony Blair himself, now represents Labour's instinctive hold on the national mindset. Listen to most of his Cabinet colleagues being interviewed and you hear only a speak-your-weight machine, bludgeoning you with their one single line. Blunkett engages. He answers the questions. He doesn't fear being caught out because he says what he genuinely thinks, not what he has been forced by party orthodoxy to think. Whilst some of his less admirable Cabinet colleagues no more resemble conviction politicians than does Michael Barrymore and happily spout whatever gets them promoted, Blunkett has only ever been on his own intellectual journey, a journey which sometimes leads him to a difference of approach to the New Labour coterie, but which is nonetheless down the same road as that traveled by the Labour Party as a whole.
Blunkett has now emerged as a prime contender for the Labour leadershsip. I would - and have - put money on him winning. With Gordon Brown having made enemies of almost the entire Cabinet, ex-Cabinet ministers, most junior and former ministers, and now most of the trade unions who will have a third of the vote, and with David Blunkett having long been the darling of the party membership, it is difficult to see - Charles Clarke, perhaps, apart - who could beat him. But it is trite to dismiss Politics and Progress as simnply a leadership manifesto, as have most commentators. For one thing, it is far too serious a book. It is a policy wonk's beach reading, full of particpation rates, reciprocities and tax credits. It is not light reading. But if you want to see what Labour's third and fourth terms might look like, start here.
David Blunkett, Politics and Progress, Politicos, £8.99

Ask almost any pianist - one could almost say any musician - who was the greatest of the twentieth century, and the chances are that you will be told 'Sviatoslav Richter'. Music is, of course, not a competition; there are few more pointless pursuits than the musical equivalent of deciding whether Jack Hobbs or Don Bradman was truly the greatest. Schnabel, Fischer, Michelangeli, Gilels, to single out - quite arbitrarily - just four: all were unique geniuses. But none had the combination of range, depth, technique, sound, command and sheer musicianship of Richter. To hear Richter play was to be transported from this world into another universe where nothing else mattered but the sound coming from the piano. (Not least because he insisted in his last years in playing in near total darkness, with the single, small stage lamp which illuminated his score having the effect of both drawing you in to focus on the piano, and closing off any possibility of watching the man rather than listening to the music.)
I was lucky enough to hear him play a number of times: the composers he chose were typically varied: Bach, Beethoven, Shostakovich, Chopin, Mozart, Haydn, Schumann, Prokofiev and Hindemith. But for me, above all else, it was his Schubert which was truly miraculous. I can still remember the effect of his G major sonata, a decade after the concert.
Recordings, of course, never do justice. But for all Richter's ambivalence to the idea of capturing for eternity a moment which, by definition, should be spontaneous, Richter left a large legacy, many of them worthy of his memory. His Bach Well-Tempered Klavier, his Mussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition, his Liszt Sonata and the recent BBC archive releases of his Schubert give a wonderful illustration of the sheer variety of his mastery.
But for a rounded indication of Richter's genius, Bruno Monaingeon's edition of his notebooks and edited conversations is indispensable - as well as being pure joy from start to finish. Monsaingeon has taken his conversations with Richter recorded in his compelling documentary, 'Richter: The Enigma', and edited them into a narrative which, wisely, does not attempt to be comprehensive or chronological but rather aims to give a flavour of Richter's often willful personality. Like almost all truly great artists, he was full of paradoxes. He hated arranging anything, whether it was a concert or a journey, and he hated traveling as part of a schedule. But he was, of course, utterly rigid in his practice method: constant repetition of the same prase, then the next, then the next.
Although for he was effectively trapped behind the Iron Curtain until 1960, he felt no pressing urge to see outside. Indeed, as he puts it: 'How many times afterwards have I thought of how happy I'd have been if only I'd missed the train (at the start of his first journey to America). I'd never have got to know America, and would have been all the better for itÖThe noise, the cheap culture, the advertising and the language!'.
But when left to his devices - no promoters, no advance bookings, no scheduled programmes - he loved to travel. He was at his most relaxed when he simply got behind the wheel of a car, stopped wherever he fancied, and gave an impromptu concert. When well over 70, he drove from Moscow to Japan and back, giving nearly 100 such concerts in a few months crossing the Urals and Siberia.
Monsaingeon also includes selections from Richter's notebooks, into which he poured his thoughts, whether it was after performing or listening. These two hundred pages alone make this a book to savour. Thus is Vladimir Horowtiz despatched in one paragraph: 'Phenomenal and off-putting and excellent and fantastic tone, and thoroughly contradictory. Such talent! And such a trivial mind...Such a sympathetic person, so artistic and yet so limited. It's all so strange.'
The great conductor, Kurt Sanderling, said that 'not only can he play well, he can also read music'. That just about says it all.
Sviatoslav Richter Notebooks and Conversations
Bruno Monsaingeon (translated Stewart Spencer)
Faber and Faber £25

All credit to the editors, Neal Lawson and Neil Sherlock, for this enterprising and useful book. In good New Labour fashion, they - one an early Labour 'moderniser' and the other a former adviser to Paddy Ashdown - have spotted a gap in the market and put together nearly two dozen specially written essays on different aspects of 'the progressive century', from philosophy to practical policy.
The title is, of course, meant to be forward looking. In Britain, the progressive cause was notable above all else in the last century for its failure to offer anything resembling an attractive, workable programme for government - or governance, a good chattering class word, as the authors of The Progressive Century would no doubt have it. The only mainstream party less successful than Labour at winning power was, of course, the Liberal Party. Even in May 1997, surely the most propitious time in half a century for either party, the best Labour could manage was 43.2 per cent of the vote - 1.3 per cent more popular than John Major's Conservatives in 1992.
So although it is in the nature of the progressive beast to be optimistic, we should not fall too easily for idea which permeates every page of this collection, that there is a trapped progressive majority just waiting to be allowed by proportional representation to usher in a new political dawn.
Kirsty Milne tries valiantly to make the case that the Scottish Parliament, with its coalitions and consensual rules of procedure, is doing just that. New it certainly is; but there are few more depressing sights than the latest tier of political timeservers and nonentities who strut around Scotland (or, in Henry McLeish's case, around whichever country he can find to host a 'state visit')
as if the electorate should be grateful to have them, and to pay for them, simply because they are Scottish. Devolution may have been the 'settled will' of Scotland, but nothing - not even eighteen years of alien Conservative rule - has given the SNP a greater boost, nor made the break up of the UK more likely and a more immediate prospect.
It is one thing for a book on the progressive century to come to take a Panglossian view of recent events. But Lawson and Sherlock seem to live in a parallel universe when they write that "a new Welsh coalition also offers a ray of hope to progressives" and "there has been some extension to the work of the Joint Cabinet Committee into European defence and security policy, as well as United Nations reform". To most ordinary people - and certainly, according to the opinion polls, to most of the Welsh - the Welsh Assembly is just about the most tawdry and unnecessary example of the left's obsession with political structures. As for the JCC, Peter Shore once told me that the extent of his obligations to his Liberal shadow during the Lib-Lab pact was giving him a lift in his ministerial car. Plus ca change.
Beyond simple electoral mathematics and the myth of the natural anti-Conservative majority (a myth punctured by David Cowling's excellent chapter 'Is There a Progressive Electorate?'), no one answers the question 'why?'. The assumption throughout is that, because Labour and the Liberals stem from the same fundamental political roots, they ought not to be in competition.
Hold on a minute. Just as there are decent and foul Labour Party supporters and decent and foul Conservatives, so, despite their cuddly image, there are also foul Liberals. In many inner-city areas the Liberals provide the only real opposition to Labour, and their political principles amount to nothing more than being 'not Labour'. And that means that many of them - I had the unfortunate pleasure of having to deal with them in East London for much of the 1990s - are out and out racists. The Tower Hamlets Liberals' 'Sons and Daughters' housing policy which, if it had not been illegal, would have given sons and daughters of local (ie white) residents priority, was a despicable piece of racist opportunism. And anyone who has encountered the Liberals in by-elections knows just how dirty they fight.
I don't want a coalition with that type of Liberal. I don't even want to work closely with them. I want to defeat them.
As for the decent Liberals, if they were indeed liberal then, perhaps. But Philip Collins' incisive essay on the social market cites J.A.Hobson, the New Liberal thinker, in The Crisis of Liberalism at the turn of the century, who shows why today's Liberals do not deserve the label. 'Liberalism will retain its distinction from socialism by taking for its chief test of policy the freedom of the individual citizen rather than the strength of the state'. Admittedly the Liberals are past masters at being a hundred things at once, depending on their audience, but the Liberals of 2001 might have had as their electoral slogan: 'vote Liberal to expand the state', so monotonous was programme of rising tax and state provision, about as far from the ideals of liberalism as it is possible to get.
The Progressive Century is full of thought-provoking essays, most of them well written. It is well worth reading even if, as I, you find the whole notion of a natural alliance of progressives risible.
The Progressive Century - the Future of the Centre-Left in Britain
Ed. Neal Lawson and Neil Sherlock
Palgrave, £14.99

Oh dear. The thesis of Liz Davies' memoir of her two years on Labour's National Executive Committee is that the party has changed for the worse since she first entered Labour politics in the 1980s. Counter-intuitive pieces are often the most stimulating of all. But it is surely not counter-intuitive so much as plain warped to look back at 1979-87 as glory days in Labour's history.
It's difficult to see who could be gain anything from reading this puerile book, written in the whining, sneering tone familiar to anyone unfortunate enough to have had to do battle with Davies' political bedfellows in the days when they made the party unelectable.
Essentially it is an account, based on her contemporaneous notes, of what happened at NEC meetings. But since the thrust of Davies' complaint is correct - that that the NEC is no longer of any real importance - who cares what one non-entity member said to another? Sad political obsessives, myself included, perhaps. But even I found myself drifting off at yet another whinge or mind-numbing account of who was and who was not put on to a sub-committee. This book did however have one use: it reminded me that we should all be grateful that the days when attendance at a Labour Party meeting meant a series of verbal, and sometime physical, assaults by droning Marxists and assembled Trots are over.
'Through the Looking Glass' has been sold as an expose - by The Guardian, no less - a damning indictment of New Labour's control-freakery. If only. There is a powerful case to be made by someone, but Davies' snarling contempt for any Labour politician not a member of her own coterie blinds her to reality and destroys her case. She sets the tone straight away, describing how, sitting at the top table at her first NEC meeting were Tony Blair, John Prescott, then party chairman Richard Rosser and then General Secretary Tom Sawyer, "positioned against the west window, and the four men sat with their backs to the setting sun. Facing them, the rest of us could see little but shadowy faces, surrounded by bright aureoles. It seemed that Milbank's obsession with stage management extended even into private meetings of the Party's elected ruling body". In the Looking Glass world of Liz Davies, a top table at one end of a room, and the sun shining through the window temporarily blinding others in the room, is evidence of political control-freakery. To the rest of us it is simply the sun shining through the window.
One can only assume that it is Davies' bias which is responsible for the inaccuracies which riddle her book and which render her useless even as a guide to events. After her own experience in being barred from standing as Labour candidate in Leeds North East, she rants against Millbank's baleful influence in drawing up the shortlist for some parliamentary selections, citing the contest to succeed Tony Benn in Chesterfield as a prime example. Helen Seaford, with 6 nominations, was not put on the shortlist by the NEC panel, "which had preferred several other candidates who had received fewer nominationsÖOne of these was Liz Kendall, Harriet Harman's researcher".
Kendall might as well have been an urban planner for Pol Pot, so damning is the association with Harman in the poisonous world of the hard left.
The only problem with Davies' Millbank conspiracy theory is that she is plain wrong. Kendall - not a 'researcher' but a Special Adviser, and long since having stopped working for Harman when she sought the selection - received seven nominations, one more than Seaford. Keynes once remarked that 'when the facts change, I change my mind'. Like most of her colleagues, when the facts do not support Davies, she apparently makes her own up.
Even where she has a case, Davies fluffs it. There is an indictment to be written of Labour's naÔve attitude to big business and some of its unsavoury benefactors. But by damning any contact with business, and by attacking everyone involved with the party's fundraising, she destroys any credibility. The party, she writes in horror, made £1.5 million from its party conference. Presumably she would prefer Labour to lose money. She attacks Prof Keith Ewing, appointed to chair a review into fundraising, as a Millbank stooge. Anyone who has ever had contact with Ewing knows that you would have go a long way to find anyone less of a stooge. She ends by describing how, from February, all donations over £5000 must be identified, as if somehow this was a ruling imposed on Labour by some deus ex machina (Labour "has lostÖthe opportunity to seize the moral high ground from the Tories") rather than the result of legislation brought in by Labour and opposed by the Conservatives!
This is a horrible little book which adds nothing to an important debate about Labour's direction. We can see just how genuine is Davies' loyalty and commitment to the Labour Party from the fact that, now that she has realised her form of politics has lost the argument, she has simply run away and resigned.
Through The Looking Glass - A Dissenter Inside New Labour
Liz Davies
Verso £15