When the Chilean miners emerged into daylight the union members present must have longed for some stimulating reading and doubtless headed off to the Santiago branch of Waterstones – El agua apedrea? – to stock up on some challenging polemics. To their amazement they will have witnessed the greatest eruption of books on one subject since last year’s rush of X-Factor Christmas specials.
It seems as though every book being published is an examination, an exhumation, an exorcism or a eulogy to the Blair-Brown years and our Chilean comrades may be forgiven for returning to the tenebrous gloom of the mine rather than wade through this vast and ever expanding sludge that smothers the shelves of our shops.
Although a distant rumble from faraway Fife warns the world of the imminent arrival of Gordon Brown’s magisterial tome we are already able to stock up on 17 volumes that have sprung fully formed from the febrile brains of some of the key participants in the great experiment that was once New Labour.
Steve Richards and Andrew Rawnsley are sound and well sourced while Alastair Campbell must have been barking into a dictaphone while berating the media barons for he has recorded the minutest minutiae of the era with such thoroughness it’s scarcely believable he found time to get to Turf Moor, let alone run the country. And Lord Mandelson has explained that if only the Labour Party had been more loyal and attentive to Peter then all the agony could have been averted. Tony Blair has produced an amazing apologia pro vita sua that may well set him on the road to beatification in the next century but stands today as a truly remarkable primer on the prime ministerial arts and, if he spares us little detail, then we must forgive him in the same spirit of honesty and openness that encouraged President Hamid Karzai to explain away bags containing millions of dollars in cash from Iran by noting that the business was completely transparent as the containers were see through.
And then we have Trio by Giles Radice. Giles occupies a place in the history of the movement that is often underestimated. He is remembered as one of the brightest officers of the old GMB and author of the Fabian pamphlet Southern Discomfort that shocked many of us out of old certainties back when the Tories were last slashing and burning their way through our country, our communities and our children’s futures. I remember him as a warm and welcoming comrade who may not have been delighted to be cornered by neophyte MPs in 1997 but hid his feelings well and gave unstintingly of his time.
As one of the best thinkers on the subject of socialism in Europe he ranks with the great Denis MacShane and any book by Giles is opened in the certain knowledge that it will be well written, intelligently argued and the tale will be told from the perspective of a true insider. Trio does not disappoint. It delights. For a short overview of the intense inter-relationship of three uniquely remarkable people you could not better this book.
As a direct descendant of one of Garibaldi’s generals Giles manages to marshal his facts in good order and keeps the narrative marching on to what may not be a great victory but is certainly one of the most perceptive conclusions of any of the regiment of books on the subject. He tells the story chapter by chapter, man by man. He draws out the interplay and, if much of the psychodrama seems a distant memory, it is never stale in the telling here. There are no startling revelations but a well-worked body of evidence that spares none of the subjects although it is not blind to their qualities and the extent of their shared achievement.
This is not a three way psychological biography in the mould of Leo Abse but a coolly drawn portrait of the trio. The sadness is almost tangible as he chronicles the dysfunctional depths to which the trio descended – the talented Mandelson, someone almost too big for the party; the successful Blair, who achieved the henotic miracle and was not just a man who recorded the highest ever approval rating of any British Prime Minister but did speak for, and to, the nation, so successfully that David Cameron has shaped his political persona on a pale imitation; and Brown, the most demanding and fascinating of the three. Giles is a good enough economist to appreciate the towering achievements of Brown as Chancellor and sufficiently human to weep at the dark days that followed the “election that never was”.
For such an elegant writer it is extraordinary that this book is littered with shocking examples of absentee proof readers; these range from a reference to the late Joan Maynard, widely known as Stalin’s granny, as “Stalin’s nanny” and the identification of a hitherto unknown Labour MP named Sean Simon. My favourite is a quotation from the then Shadow Employment Secretary (Blair) which should have referred to the Tories “putting their hands into the magician’s hat hoping to pull out a bright, sprightly, lively rabbit” but which replaces “hoping” with “hopping”. These, however, are petty matters and do not detract from the best single volume about the New Labour era written by one who was there and told without personal prejudice or through a prism tinted rose.
I kept hearing the late Ian Dury singing “What a Waste” as I read this but Giles sums it up far better than anyone else by saying: “Could they have done better? Like the Attlee administrations of 1945-51, they helped to make Britain a fairer and more civilised place. But if Blair, Brown and Mandelson had combined more effectively, New Labour could have achieved more.” As a coda to the grand opera of New Labour this simple and modest statement – written in sadness more than anger – sums it all up for me.
