The Left at War by Michael Bérubé
New York University Press, £19.99
“Whither the left?” books are an acquired taste, but once you’ve got it you can’t help yourself. My bookshelves are groaning with volumes, mostly deservedly long forgotten, outlining how the left has got it wrong and what it must do next; the oldest of which go back to the era of the French Revolution when the idea of a left-right divide in politics first took hold.
Rope
Almeida Theatre, London
I am not advocating the return of capital punishment, but theatre surely lost something when murderers no longer had fear for their own lives. The noose is surely what killers Brandon and Granillo would have been given in Patrick Hamilton’s 1927 play, Rope.
Watering the words
Watering Can by Caroline Bird
Carcanet, £9.95
Caroline Bird arrives, as William Wordsworth had it in Intimations of Immortality, trailing clouds of glory. She was born in 1986, brought up in Leeds, went to school in York and is now reading English at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. She was a winner of the Foyles Young Poet of the Year Award in 1999, when she was 13, and the Peterloo Poets Competition for Young Poets three years later, when she also picked up an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, Looking Through Letterboxes, was published in 2002 and her second, Trouble Came to the Turnip, appeared in 2006 and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Plays she has written have had rehearsed readings at the Royal Court, student productions in Oxford and performances on the Edinburgh Fringe.
As efforts increase to fill all the vacancies before the election, and the all-women-shortlist caravanserai makes its way around the selection trail, the usual crop of oddities and rumours abound. Such as in Liverpool Wavertree where retiring MP Jane Kennedy, has one of the hopefuls living in her home during the contest and was barred [...]
There ought to be a new Westminster constituency named Roche Central, after the indefatigable former minister who is desperate to find another safe seat after allowing her 10,614 majority in Hornsey and Wood Green to melt away at the last election. It might be the only way to put her out of her exiled misery. [...]
Only a manufacturing manifesto can restore Britain’s lost wealth and prestige, argues Austin Mitchell
When Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush and Tony Blair unleashed “shock and awe” on Baghdad Geoff Hoon asked: “Has the war started?” Despite being Defence Secretary, he was out of the loop. As far as Blair was concerned, when it came to decision-making, Hoon was unnecessary. His unfailing support for the Iraq war meant he had only to follow orders. Now, once again, Hoon doesn’t seem to realise there is a war on – Labour against the Tories.
Since Christmas Day, everyone in the United States knows that the cricket-box bomber visited Yemen. Luckily for Gordon Brown, the suspicion directed towards Yemen has not touched on Britain, even though the would-be auto-castrato, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, spent more time in London than there.
One Sunday morning a few years ago, I found myself doing a newspaper review for Sky News, in the way you do when you’ve got a book out and you feel obliged to do whatever your publisher’s publicity department tells you in order to whore the damn thing. I’ve no idea if my appearance sold a single extra copy, but I remember standing in the green room watching the monitor, on which the guest appearing before me was being grilled by Adam Boulton about some now forgotten issue of the day.
Labour may be down, but decisive action would show the party is still very far from out, argues Mike Ion