Servants of the People

A spirited yet all too plausible, 'insider' account of New Labour's first three years, drawing on the author's extensive stock of private contacts and confidential information. The trouble is, it focuses wholly on the over-heated febrile, egomanical, bitching and back-stabbing world of a tiny number of people, albeit at the very top of New Labour Politics. We get very little about New Labour as a political project and the way it is transforming, for better or worse, the political culture of Britain. At the core of the book is the long-running tension between Tony Blair and Gordon Browm, triggered by Brown's belief that he was cheated out of the Labour leadership and hence the Preiership by the younger and less-experienced Blair. We get plenty from the rumour machine about Brown's alleged 'psychological flaws' but that, like so much else in the book, is reported as gossip and we are repeatedly denied access to the identity of the author's sources, too many of which are merely referred to as 'private information'. While there are good bits, for example on Nothern Ireland and Kosovo, there is no sustained analysis of New Labour's achievements or, for that matter why it has been such a disappointment to may of its erstwhile supporters: its embrace of the spin culture, its real contempt for 'old' Labour, its failure to distance itself from sleaze and its over-enthusiastic cozying up to big business. It is a book that will enthral all those who live inside The Whitehall - Westminster goldfish bowl but it leaves the definitive book about New Labour still to be written. (Kirkus UK)