Author Archives: Paul Anderson

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 15 November 1998

I was going to write a worthy column about co-operation between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, but in the week that Labour’s National Executive Committee passed an idiotic motion barring its members from talking to the press, there’s a better subject. Now is the ideal time to grass up all the politicians who used to leak from the NEC in the good old days when Labour was in opposition and I was editing Tribune.

The worst offender of all was none other than Tony Blair, who leaked every document that Labour’s review group on trade union links produced in 1992-93 – a course of action that almost lost him his job as shadow home secretary. John Evans, the socialist societies’ NEC representative, described Blair’s briefings to selected journalists as the most outrageous breach of confidentiality he’d ever seen. Coming from a man who was himself no stranger to letting NEC documents go walkabout, that was, well, par for the course. The crucial point, however, was that John Smith agreed. If only he’d acted.

Tribune never to my knowledge benefited directly from Blair leaks from the NEC: the Guardian was his favoured outlet, Patrick Wintour his favoured interlocuter. I don’t remember talking to Gordon Brown or Robin Cook about NEC business, although they were always perfectly happy to talk about what was going on in the shadow cabinet and in various policy committees. So was John Prescott, though of course he wasn’t a member of the NEC at the time.

For NEC documents we relied for the most part on two other current Cabinet stalwarts, David Blunkett and Clare Short – or rather their gofers. As a matter of course, their researchers gave us everything we wanted, usually by fax. I’ve a filing cabinet draw full of extraordinarily tedious material to prove it.

I always assumed that the staffers did it with their bosses’ approval, although it’s impossible to be entirely sure. Politicians normally leak through their staff for the simple reason that it’s deniable.

My favourite example concerns the supposed relationship between John Major and Clare Latimer, the Downing Street cook – later the subject of a famous libel action that drove the New Statesman to bankruptcy and the clutches of Geoffrey Robinson. I got the gossip from a senior staffer in Gordon Brown’s office months before it hit even the diary columns. My source claimed to working for a Labour “dirty tricks” operation under Brown’s control. Unfortunately, I do not have the contemporaneous notes that would allow me to identify him.

But back to the main story. Both Blunkett and Short were always happy to give Tribune full and frank accounts – off the record, but that’s normal – of what had happened at NEC meetings within minutes of their finishing, as indeed were several other NEC members. Most of them were rather dull soft-left leadership-loyalists like Diana Jeuda and Tom Sawyer, who are now fully paid-up Blairites. In my day, Tribune was off-message as far as the hard left was concerned. Sad git that I am, I have even framed a piece by Ken Livingstone denouncing me as the most right-wing editor this paper has ever had.

Livingstone was not a member of the NEC in the early 1990s – a pity, because he was a prodigious leaker in his pomp. But our relations with his comrades were frosty. Tribune’s news editor at the time was an unreconstructed Trotskyist (and a brilliant hack) but even he had trouble extracting hot poop from Dennis Skinner on the NEC because of Tribune’s reputation.

Not that this was too much of a problem, because Skinner himself shot his bolt once every month in a column in Campaign Group News – setting out in minute detail who had said what and how all the votes had gone at every NEC meeting. It was self-congratulatory stuff. But it was the only thing in most issues of Campaign Group News that was worth reading.

All of which is to say . . . well, it was a lot of fun and I regret nothing. The NEC leakers of the early nineties had no effect on Labour’s electoral fortunes. Directly and through their intermediaries, they kept Tribune in business journalistically. And a column by the editor today on his experiences on the Blair NEC would do wonders not just for credibility but for sales. It is in Tribune’s interest that he reveals as much as possible of what goes behind closed doors in Millbank Tower.

But it’s also in the interest of Labour Party members to have available the details of what is being done in their name. The message to the control freaks is simple: up yours.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 2 November 1998

I have a sneaking suspicion that historians will come to see the election of Gerhard Schröder’s red-green coalition in Germany as a turning point for British politics.

Far more than Labour’s victory in Britain last year, the coming to power of the German Social Democratic Party has transformed the European political landscape. A little more than a month after the Bundestag election, it is already clear that the new German finance minister, Oskar Lafontaine, and his French counterpart, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, share the view that European macroeconomic policy needs a radical shake-up. Germany will be lining up with France to push for stronger political control over the policy of the European Central Bank and for growth-oriented policies at the European level. Jacques Delors’s early-nineties schemes for Europe-wide public works programmes – blocked by the British Tories in 1994 – are being dusted off again. Contrary to what Tribune and other left Eurosceptics would have us believe, Eurokeynesianism is back, and this time it’s serious.

The Murdoch press is not altogether pleased by this – and nor is the British government, despite Tony Blair’s declaration of support for concerted European action to create jobs at last month’s European summit meeting. Although Gordon Brown flirted briefly with the idea of Europe-wide counter-cyclical economic policies in opposition five years ago, the general thrust of Labour thinking about the economy has been hostile to Eurokeynesianism. Rather than revive Delors, the British government (like the Murdoch press) would go for deregulation, stricter competition policies, labour market flexibility and so on.

The problem for Labour, however, is that its views on economic policy do not carry much weight with its partners in the European Union. This is partly because some continental social democratic parties – particularly the French – are justifiably wary of what they see as Labour’s “neo-liberalism”. But it is mainly because Britain is not joining the European single currency in the first wave. In the past few weeks, it has become embarrassingly obvious that, for all Blair’s talk of “leading” in Europe, Britain is desperately chasing the EMU pack. In such circumstances, it really doesn’t matter how many well-received initiatives the Labour government comes up with on defence policy or the environment.

Which goes some way to explaining why the government has all of a sudden decided to make a start on persuading the electorate that Britain should join the single currency. Until recently, Labour had little of substance to say about economic and monetary union. Of course, it wanted it to work. But it would make up its mind on British membership of the single currency in the fullness of time. Britain would join only if the government thought conditions were right and if voters backed the single currency in a referendum.

Now the message has perceptibly changed. In the past couple of weeks, both Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown have made it clear that British participation in EMU was now less a matter of “if” than one of “when”.

Last week, Mandelson told a group of businessmen that the creation of the single currency “will be a major step towards the creation of a genuine European single market. Across the whole euro area – by far Britain’s most important trading partner – prices will be quoted in the same currency. There will be no hiding place for high charges and consumer rip-offs.”

This week, Brown told the Confederation of British Industry conference that the Government had “decisively and unambiguously put this country on a new road of constructive engagement with Europe”. In January, he went on, he would be publishing a detailed plan for British entry into the single currency.

For many on the British left, this is not good news. Some, including most of the Campaign Group, are simply stuck in a seventies time-warp, antipathetic to anything to do with the dreadful capitalist conspiracy that is the Common Market and oblivious to the constraints imposed by globalisation on a medium-sized state’s economic policy. Others, mainly on what used to be called the soft left, are more sophisticated. They have no objection to the idea of a single currency in theory. But they believe that the European Central Bank will inevitably impose a severe monetary regime that will have dire effects on employment.

I disagree, because I am optimistic that France and Germany will succeed in putting in place the mechanisms necessary to ensure the bank’s anti-inflation brief is not the only determinant of European macroeconomic policy. The irony is that the main reason for my optimism is that Britain is not in the first wave of EMU and so cannot sabotage the continental Eurokeynesians’ efforts. Strangely enough, by staying out for now, Labour has increased the likelihood that the euro zone will be something the left will want to join in 2005.

Chartist, November-December 1998

There were always going to be losers among sitting MEPs in the selection of Labour candidates for next year’s European Parliament elections.

The elections are to be held for the first time under a regional list system of proportional representation – which means that Labour will win only 43 of the 84 seats in Great Britain, down from 62 under first past the post in 1994, even if it does as well as in the 1997 general election.

But the way that the losers have been chosen has shocked even hardened cynics in the party.

The obvious democratic way to choose candidates would have been by one member one vote ballot of Labour members in each constituency, with rankings determined by the number of votes won by each candidate.

But the party leadership wanted to control the selections, and most sitting MEPs believed they should automatically be given winnable places on the regional lists. So the NEC decided to ditch OMOV in favour of a system that gave the preferences of party members a subsidiary role.

Sitting MEPs were guaranteed places on lists if OMOV “trigger ballots” in their existing Euro-constituencies endorsed them – although they were not promised winnable positions. Every single sitting MEP who had decided to stand again comfortably won the trigger ballot.

Other hopefuls had a more difficult task. First they had to be nominated by a constituency Labour party, then win a place in a national pool of potential candidates in an OMOV Euro-constituency ballot. An NEC-dominated selection panel then whittled down the national pool to a shortlist and finally chose the candidates and their ranking after interviewing the sitting MEPs and the new potential candidates.

The party apparatus claims that the process was rigorous and fair. But even MEPs who have a good chance of winning say that the selection interviews were superficial and based on loyalty tests, with the members of the panel showing little knowledge of the workings of the European Parliament. And the results certainly suggest that MEPs considered awkward by the Labour leadership were singled out for rejection.

Of the 49 sitting Labour MEPs standing again, 12 were given list positions that Labour cannot possibly win even if it does as well next year as it did in 1997. Of these 12, no fewer than 10 were signatories of the famous advertisement in the Guardian, backing retention of Clause Four of the Labour constitution, that appeared the same day in 1995 that Tony Blair met the European Parliamentary Labour Party in Brussels. Another five of the Clause Four rebels will lose their seats if Labour does just a little worse than in 1997 – which is the least that can be expected.

Three sitting MEPs given unwinnable positions – Alex Smith, Michael McGowan and David Morris – have withdrawn as candidates since the lists were drawn up in late September, and a fourth, Christine Oddy, is threatening legal action against the party. Several other sitting MEPs whose only hope is a repeat of Labour’s 1997 performance are quietly seething.

Not that the MEPs are the only ones with a cause for complaint. Only six of the 106 new potential candidates that made it through to the national pool have been given list positions that are winnable.

“We all knew it would be difficult to choose candidates for the new list system,” said one MEP. “But at least if we’d had OMOV it would have been down to party members to decide who they should be and the results would have had democratic legitimacy. The way we actually did them, the selections looked like a giant stitch-up.”

New Times, 30 October 1998

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 12 October 1998

Steve Platt made a lot of good points last week about the left and proportional representation. He’s absolutely right about the debilitating effect on British politics of the combination of ever-more-centralised party machines and a first-past-the-post electoral system for the House of Commons. General elections have been turned into an undignified scramble for the votes of a handful of affluent, socially conservative “swing voters” – “scumbags from suburbia who read the Daily Mail”, as a senior Labour official put it to me some years ago. The result has been the marginalisation of creative thinking and dissident voices in mainstream politics.

So I agree with Platt entirely when he argues that a genuine PR system for the House of Commons, far from condemning us to never-ending coalitions of centre-left or centre-right, could liberate the left by allowing a credible red-green grouping to win parliamentary representation. Just look at Germany.

The problem, however, is that when Lord Jenkins’s Independent Commission on the Voting System reports later this month it is set to propose a system that rules out any such thing.

According to no less an authority than Hugo Young in the Guardian, Jenkins will come out for a hybrid system known as “AV-plus” to be put to voters in the government’s promised PR referendum. Under AV-plus, around 500 MPs would be elected in single-member constituencies by the alternative vote, and 150 or so “top-up” MPs would be added to ensure greater proportionality of results in each city and county.

Supporters of AV-plus say that it is the only option that both satisfies the Jenkins commission’s terms of reference – “broad proportionality, the need for stable government, an extension of voter choice and the maintenance of a link between MPs and geographical constituencies” – and is capable of winning the support of both the Liberal Democrat and Labour leaderships.

They could be right: we shall see. For our purposes here, however, what is important is that AV-plus as described by Young is also designed to keep small parties out of parliament.

For a start, the use of the alternative vote for single-member-constituency MPs would if anything make it more difficult for small parties to win seats than it is at present. Under AV, voters mark their ballot papers not with a single “x” but by numbering their preferences 1, 2, 3 and so on. If no candidate gets more than 50 per cent of first preferences, the bottom-placed candidate is eliminated and his or her second preferences are added to the other candidates’ totals, and so on until one candidate tops 50 per cent. Its main effect is to encourage the election of “least objectionable” candidates – and it has rightly been castigated as a recipe for making our political life even blander than it is now.

What is really disappointing, however, is the proposal for electing the top-up MPs by cities and counties rather than by regions. With top-up systems, the smaller the clusters of single-member constituencies that are being topped up, the larger the share of the vote a party needs to win a top-up seat in any cluster. If, under a regional AV-plus system, a party were to get 10 per cent of AV first preferences but no single-member seats in a region with 40 single-member and 10 top-up seats, it would almost certainly win top-up representation. In an extremely localised AV-plus system, a party winning the same share of first preferences in a city with four single-member constituencies and one top-up seat would not win anything.

Of course, we’ll have to wait to read the small print before coming to firm conclusions. But I’m afraid that the dream of the emergence of a credible new red-green party is going to have to remain a dream (at least for Commons elections) for a little while longer.

Which is not to say that the left should mobilise to trash the Jenkins report or back the status quo in the referendum campaign. Sticking to first-past-the-post would effectively wipe out the prospects of PR for the Commons for a generation – and that would be a disaster.

In spite of last year’s landslide, Labour should never forget that first-past-the-post has not been kind to it: 1997 is only the third time it has won a comfortable parliamentary majority. For all its faults, AV-plus would protect Britain from a repeat of the elective dictatorship of the Thatcher era – a distant prospect now, perhaps, but not necessarily so in five years’ time. However imperfect its proportionality, it would be at least a significant step towards fairness in the electoral system: more votes would count. And once it was in place it could at least be improved.

In other words, it’s a case of supporting the bad against the worse – a bit like voting Labour at election time, in fact.

Paul Anderson, review of Robin Cook by John Kampfner (Gollancz, £16.99), Tribune, 3 October 1998

As instant political biographies go, John Kampfner’s Robin Cook is not bad. Too many examples of the genre are poorly researched, badly written hagiographies. Kampfner’s book is thorough, well crafted and for the most part balanced.

It is particularly good on Cook’s career before he became Foreign Secretary last year. Of course, there are a few errors of fact. Contrary to Kampfner’s belief, Kingsley Martin was not editor of the New Statesman in 1964 when Cook started reading it; and cruise missiles arrived in Britain in 1983, not 1980 as he states. But in context these are minor mistakes: on the important things, Kampfner’s research is meticulous.

His account of Cook’s formative years in the 1960s and 1970s, as student politician, Edinburgh councillor and radical back-bench MP, is superb; and he negotiates with aplomb the intricacies of Labour’s debates and internal power struggles in the 1980s and early 1990s. On Cook’s longstanding anti-militarism, his changing attitudes to devolution and Europe, his Keynesian interventionism in economic policy and his conversion to the cause of proportional representation, Kampfner is excellent.

His most revealing chapter is on Cook’s dithering after John Smith’s death over whether to stand against Tony Blair for the Labour leadership and his belated decision to jump on the Blair bandwagon. There is a strong case for believing that Cook’s failure of nerve was far more important than Gordon Brown’s at the same time. In spring 1994, Brown was in the political doldrums inside the Labour Party because of his caution in economic policy, while Cook’s reputation was riding high on the strength of his handling of the arms-to-Iraq scandal. Had Cook declared his intention to stand early – well, who knows? Kampfner has the sense not to answer this question directly, but he does make it clear that there were plenty of people who took Cook’s chances very seriously.

On Cook as Foreign Secretary, the book is less satisfactory. Kampfner tells the story competently enough, and much of his appraisal of Cook’s first year-and-a-bit in office is fair. He is undoubtedly right that the Foreign Secretary has had a torrid time in the press – particularly over his love life (a story retold here at unnecessary length) but also because of supposed “gaffes” over Kashmir, Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine, and Sierra Leone. It is also incontrovertible that Cook has been frozen out of decision-making on European economic and monetary union and that he has been over-ruled on arms sales to Indonesia. As a loyal member of the government, he has been unable to act in public as a tribune of the Labour left.

But Kampfner is far too ready to write Cook off. The truth is that nothing that has gone wrong for the Foreign Secretary has irreversibly damaged his standing. His bad press over Israeli settlements and Sierra Leone was not deserved; and the worst should soon be over as far as publicity about his love life is concerned. He also has substantial achievements to his name: his role in normalising relations with Europe, his part in restraining the gung-ho instincts of Blair and Bill Clinton over Iraq and his changes to the culture of the Foreign Office.

Perhaps most important, Blair knows that he cannot get rid of him. Cook on the back benches as the figurehead the parliamentary left so obviously now lacks would be a nightmare for the Prime Minister. So he seems guaranteed a senior position for the foreseeable future, most likely continuing as Foreign Secretary but just possibly becoming Chancellor if Gordon Brown proves a disaster. If Blair opts for proportional representation for the Commons, moreover, Cook will become a crucial ally in Cabinet.

All of which is to say that Kampfner’s downbeat conclusion – “The man on whom so many had pinned their hopes in opposition had found himself a victim in government” – could all too easily look dated in a year’s time. I certainly hope so.

New Times, 28 August 1998

The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) has learned from bitter experience never to underestimate the powers of recovery of chancellor Helmut Kohl.

Since the liberal Free Democratic Party abandoned Helmut Schmidt’s SPD-led West German government in 1982 to become the junior partner in a coalition with Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, the Social Democrats have lost four general elections in a row to him. In three of those elections, moreover, the SPD lost after holding what seemed to be impregnable leads in mid-term opinion polls.

Will this time be different? Until recently, it seemed inconceivable that Kohl could win the general election on 27 September. In May, the polls showed the SPD, led by the business-friendly populist Gerhard Schröder, supported by some 43 per cent of voters, with the CDU-CSU on 35 per cent. Just about every pundit agreed that even Kohl’s campaigning virtuosity could not possibly close the gap.

Now, however, the crystal ball is cloudier. Polls published in August suggest that the SPD will take around 42 per cent of the vote, with the CDU-CSU between three and five percentage points behind. A quarter of voters are still undecided, and it is unclear from the polls which of the smaller parties – the FDP, the Greens, the former-communist Party of Democratic Socialism and the small parties of the far right – will clear the threshold to win seats in the Bundestag. In short, although Schröder is still the favourite to head the biggest party, Kohl appears to be catching up and there is everything to play for.

The most important reason for the revival of Kohl’s fortunes is Germany’s economic recovery this year, which has led to a sharp drop in unemployment from 4.8 million in January to 4.1 million today. But the chancellor has also been able to exploit controversy inside the SPD over Schröder’s choice as candidate finance minister, Jost Stollman, a millionaire businessman who is not a party member – controversy that Kohl claims shows the SPD remains at heart anti-business. In similar vein, he has made great play of the dangers of SPD tax increases and of the prospects of an SPD coalition with the Greens or the PDS.

Against this, the SPD has promised tax cuts and much more vigorous action to reduce unemployment, along with a reversal of the Kohl government’s unpopular cuts in pension and sickness benefit entitlements. On the vexed question of coalition, Schröder has made it clear that he wants nothing to do with the PDS but has otherwise kept his options open, merely hinting that he would prefer a ‘grand coalition’ with the CDU-CSU to a deal with the Greens.

Kohl has ruled out participation in a “grand coalition”, and so have most other leading figures in the CDU-CSU – the aim being to maximise centrist voters’ worries about the Greens. The gambit might just come off. But if it doesn’t, Kohl’s stance could ironically help bring on the outcome he says he doesn’t want by leaving the SPD with no option but a coalition with the Greens. Then again, the CDU-CSU might change its mind after the election.

All of which makes it hazardous in the extreme to predict the political complexion of the government that will be ruling Germany at the end of this year. Like most of the social democratic left in Europe, I’m hoping for an SPD-Green coalition, which would give the centre-left a predominance in the European Union that it has never enjoyed before. But I shall not be too surprised if my hopes are cruelly dashed.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 3 August 1998

I can’t be the only cynical old leftist who thought Frank Field’s complaint this week that he’d been done over by spin-doctors was just a bit ripe.

There’s no doubt that the usual suspects told journalists some extremely nasty things about him last weekend. But I remember only too well his own enthusiasm for slagging off members of his constituency party who had the temerity, in 1990-91, to try to replace him as their Labour candidate. Of course, then as now, he adopted the pose of St Frank the Martyr, the innocent victim of satanic forces, but the viciousness of his smear campaign against his opponents was remarkable. There are plenty of people in Birkenhead who are no doubt currently feeling pleased that Field has at long last tasted some of his own medicine.

What’s important about his sacking as welfare reform minister, however, is not the spin-doctors’ vulgar abuse but what it says about the government’s social security policy. And here it is possible to have some sympathy for him.

When Field was appointed last year, it was universally taken as a sign that Tony Blair favoured a radical restructuring of social security. Field had a reputation as an innovative thinker on social security, and in the years before the 1997 election had developed a coherent case for replacing the existing mess of pensions and benefits provision with a new system of universal social insurance.

Shorn of a lot of moralistic rhetoric about the importance of self-reliance, the evils of single-parent families and the like, Field’s argument came down to this. The main problem with the social security system as it had evolved under the Tories was that it left a vast number of people reliant on means-tested benefits. Means-testing — which he described as “the cancer within the welfare state” — by its very nature encouraged claimants to lie about their means, discouraged saving and created an unmotivated underclass of welfare-dependents. The solution was to replace means-tested benefits with benefits received as of right. And the only way to do this, given the general unwillingness to pay more taxes, was to make sure everyone contributed to social insurance funds.

Field made a particular point of the applicability of social insurance to pensions, which were a thorny problem for Labour. The Tories had allowed the real value of the basic state pension to decline and had done everything in their power to shift people out of the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme introduced by the 1974-79 Labour government.

Labour was committed to reducing poverty among pensioners — but it would take big tax increases to raise state pensions sufficiently to ensure a comfortable standard of living for all pensioners. And raising tax was one thing that Labour had set its heart against. Field’s scheme to replace SERPS with fully funded compulsory second pensions for everyone, which he costed in detail soon before the 1997 election, seemed to the Labour leadership to be the solution to Labour’s dilemma: better pensions for all, but no new taxes.

Or rather, that’s how it appeared when Blair gave Field his government job. Once it came down to thrashing out the detail of welfare reform, however, it was a different story. Within six months of Labour taking office, it was clear that there was an unbridgeable gulf between Chancellor Gordon Brown and Field over what should be done.

For Brown, the priorities were simple: no tax increases and reduction by any means possible of the £100 billion social security bill. He had no quarrel with means testing in principle — indeed, he thought that “targeting” was the best way to get value for money in social security spending. The Chancellor was shocked by the transition costs involved in changing to a wholly insurance-based system. Field’s proposals for compulsory savings sounded to him dangerously like new taxes.

So Brown held up publication of Field’s Green Paper on welfare reform for months while they haggled over its contents — and when it eventually emerged in March this year, six months after Field submitted the first draft, it was clear that the Chancellor had won a crucial political battle. All that remained of Field’s grand scheme was a vague statement of principles.

There was plenty wrong with Field’s original proposals. Any social insurance scheme leaves people without cover, and in an era of endemic employment insecurity the goal of abolishing means testing and providing universal benefits and pensions would be achieved more easily by introducing a citizen’s income and reviving SERPS, all paid for through by raising taxes. Nevertheless, Field’s ideas were better than sticking to the Tory policy of relying on cuts and means-testing to keep social security costs to a minimum. Now he has gone, it’s an open question whether Labour has any alternative to business as usual.

Paul Anderson, Red Pepper, August 1998

Paul Anderson, review of Gordon Brown: The First Year in Power by Hugh Pym and Nick Kochan (Bloomsbury, £16.99), Tribune, 19 July 1998

Try as I might, I cannot for the life of me work out why Hugh Pym and Nick Kochan have written this book. Gordon Brown is certainly an important political figure — or at least he seems to be right now. There is perhaps room in the market for a book-length study of his political career and economic policies that is more serious and more critical than the hagiography by Paul Routledge published earlier this year. But Pym and Kochan have not even attempted to produce such a book. This is an account, pure and simple, of the Iron Chancellor’s first year in power, only slightly more distant from its subject than Routledge’s tome.

It gives a reasonably competent narrative of events, and there is a lot of detail on Brown’s seriousness of character, his obsession with work and his staff — in particular his chief adviser, Ed Balls, and his spin-doctor, Charlie Whelan. If you missed the kite-flying, wavering and intra-Cabinet strife last autumn over whether or not Britain would join the single European currency in the first wave, you can read all about them here. The same goes for the row between Brown and Tony Blair sparked off by Routledge’s biography.

If you have been reading the newspapers for the past year, however, you won’t get much of substance from Pym and Kochan that you don’t know already — though you might find yourself getting extraordinarily irritated with their unyieldingly breathless prose and their addiction to hyperbole. Here, for example, is their account of the drafting of the Chancellor’s Commons statement on the single currency that finally brought to an end the weeks of uncertainty and farce last autumn:

Brown’s familiar speech-writing team was ordered to report for duty. Dr Colin Currie cleared his desk at his Edinburgh hospital and caught the first shuttle down to London. As usual he was put up by Geoffrey Robinson at his flat above the Grosvenor House Hotel, but there was no time to enjoy the Paymaster-General’s five-star hospitality. Currie rolled up his sleeves and joined Balls, Miliband and Whelan in the Chancellor’s private office. In all their years crafting prose from Brown’s machine-gun bursts of ideas this speech was the most difficult. Brown as always paced the room, churning over the momentous challenge before him, striving to channel his thoughts. As Currie remembered it, ‘Gordon is at his best when he is in trouble — his back was really against the wall at that time.’ The speech writers were chivvied and chided as they struggled to capture the ideas flying around them…

This stuff would be just about forgivable if Pym and Kochan stopped occasionally to explain where Brown’s policy ideas have come from or if they rounded off their narrative with a critical prognosis of New Labour economics. They do neither. As with Derek Draper’s asinine Blair’s 100 Days last year, it’s not worth buying this book if you’ve already read the extracts in the Sunday Times.