There is an amazing revelation from Tony Blair’s autobiography, A Journey: My Political Life – US link
The former prime minister’s memoir discloses that a “maddening” Mr Brown effectively blackmailed him while he was in No 10. He suspects the then chancellor of orchestrating the investigation into the cash-for-honours scandal. The pressure on Mr Blair to step aside became so great that he admits he may have become reliant on alcohol as he faced coup attempts from Mr Brown’s supporters. He discloses that he began drinking every day and needed the “support” that alcohol provided.
It is amazing that this horrific individual, Gordon Brown, became our Prime Minister for the next three years until being unceremoniously booted out by the public in the last election. A little more democracy would go a long way sometimes.
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at the moment. I first heard of this book when it was first released back in the nineties but was unable to buy it as I was living in Central Africa. Then I forgot about it and just remembered it a few weeks ago. What a great and brave book it is.
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and am enjoying it greatly. It is not a conventional biography. It’s certainly not a womb-to-tomb chronological record, nor is it one of those ubiquitous hagiographies written by a friendly journalist or party hack. Rather it is a critical and analytical study of modern political communication, although Seldon himself seems scarcely aware of this. Seldon presents us with 700 pages of text organized into 40 chapters. They deal with the twenty episodes and 20 people who are important in Blair’s life. Within a very few pages I was completely absorbed in an extraordinarily dense but very clear poltical narrative fleshed out with incisive analysis. Through the pages we watch a bright boy acquire an Oxford education, become a barrister, marry another barrister and, comparatively late in life, become interested in politics. We are introduced to such influentials in Blair’s life as Neil Kinnock, Philip Gould, Peter Mandelson, Derry Irvine, Roy Jenkins and Alastair Campbell; we are treated to impressively detailed accounts of their interaction with Blair, the political system and with each other. In the episode chapters we are treated to an even greater density of detail as we get the inside stories of such issues as Clause IV, the death of Diana, the Euro decision and Kosovo. In all cases we get detached, detailed and balanced accounts of the roles of the political actors and their interaction with the institutions of British democracy. The structure mostly works well, except for one major misjudgment. As you read the early chapters you slowly become aware that the key figure in Blair’s political life is Gordon Brown. His economic acumen sustains Blair but his jealousy and rivalry both undermines and constrains the prime minister. The portrait of Brown, however, is banished to the last chapter. About one-third of the way through the text I realized I had to know much more about him than had been revealed, so I turned to Chapter 40 and read the Brown profile. Much of the narrative then fell into place or took on new meaning. In the next edition Brown must be relocated to around about Chapter 10.
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. According to The New Yorker’s review:
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the hotly anticipated memoir of one of New Labour’s three founding architects. It is as interesting as one would imagine given Mandelson’s role as the New Labour project’s eminence grise. Peter Mandelson is one of the most influential politicians of modern times. This is his story – the story of a life played out in the back room and then on the front-line of the Labour Party during its unprecedented three terms in government. As you would expect and as I actually hoped much of the book is devoted to the two defining political relationships of Peter Mandelson’s life – with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He charts what he terms the ‘soap-opera’ years of the Labour government as a result his book is certain to ruffle many feathers especially given Mandelson’s somewhat chequered history. He was forced to resign from Cabinet twice in three years, and has cut a divisive figure through British politics but his time as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland gained him many supporters. He was a highly regarded European Commissioner before being brought back into British politics by Gordon Brown in 2008 to serve as Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, and as First Secretary and Brown’s de facto campaign manager. A campaign that was lost but one that would have been lost even more heavily without Mandelson.
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as a sort of before and after gedanken experiment. After a brief introduction, in which Mandelson blames most of his troubles on his loyalty to Brown and Blair, or to bizarre coincidences none of which are in anyway his fault. He then lists the familiar claims of New Labour’s achievements. Some of the most interesting chapters are the background pages on his early years as a member of a very privileged left-wing family in North London. But the book takes off with his early initiation into politics and the start of his controversial career as a highly successful back room `fixer’. Right from the start, it is clear that Mandelson is out to stake his claim of parity with Brown and Blair in creating New Labour, defining its policies, and steering it to election victories. He emphasizes that that he `discovered’ the duo and was the first to recognize their talents and potential for high office. The three of them became `brothers’. This didn’t last long after New Labour gained power and we now know about the fierce and corrosive war that was waged between Blair and Brown, with Mandelson often in the latter’s sights for his perceived `betrayal’ in supporting Blair. This is discussed fully, but most of the details have already appeared in Andrew Rawnsley’s recent book 
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and sometimes Mandelson’s prose drags rather. All in all though 
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from my local charity book store. It was published in 1985 and is a series of portraits based in over a hundred interviews about and with Britain’s ”entrepreneurial super stars”, and 
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is his story of a journey. In January 2002, having just spent 16 months walking across Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, Stewart began a walk across Afghanistan from Herat to Kabul. Although the Taliban had been ousted several weeks earlier, Stewart was launching a journey through a devastated, unsettled, and unsafe landscape. The recounting of that journey makes for an engrossing, surprising, and often deeply moving portrait of the land and the peoples who inhabit it. Stewart relates his encounters with ordinary villagers, security officials, students, displaced Taliban officials, foreign-aid workers, and rural strongmen, and his descriptions of the views and attitudes of those he lived with are presented in frank, unvarnished terms. Nation building in Afghanistan remains a work in progress, and 