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I am still in the financial doldrums and finding it tough.Could you kind people helpout with donations in any way large or small. I need to try and raise a hundred to drag me out if the quagmire.

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Book 17 - Chris Mullin "A View From The Foothills"

Chris Mullin "A View From the Foothills"  (Profile Books)




I have finally completed the last chapter of this book that I have been  dipping into over the last six months or so. These diary entries are the sort of book that can be read piecemeal without losing the plot so to speak.

Now then, I do not think that Tony Blair lied - well perhaps made a half-truth - but, the problem with up to date political biographies is that most of the people concerned are still about and one does not want to appear bitchy.

Chris Mullin viewed the Blair government from a relatively lowly position. He has no reason to protect the guilty and so, tells it as he sees it. Tony comes out pretty well, particularly when one considers that he and Chris were not from the same arm of the party. Gordon Brown, with whom one would have expected much more sympathy, is painted as a bit of a bully who carries his slights to the end. Rather less surprisingly, George Bush is given a hard time too.

I thoroughly approve of getting books about government whilst the issues are still alive, rather than the old British way of releasing certain details after 30 years: anyone old enough to have been interested at the time, is probably gaga when the anodyne revelations are made. This is not to say, that a later more considered view would not be good too. I also like the diary system because, in general, the remarks were made at the time of a particular incident, rather than with the wisdom of hindsight. I am not naive enough not to realise that any wildly inaccurate prediction will have been edited out but, it is probably the nearest to having been there that we plebs are likely to come.

Lots of revelations about the daily workings and endless machinations of Westminster. Most revealing are his observations of the Blair Brown rift.

Quite a depressing book for those interested in politics - it shows that decency and hard work count for very little against the mechanisms of state and power. Very readable, and thus recommended - no matter what your political persuasion is.

Eliane Glaser

Eliane Glaser from the BBC Archives - and in the Guardian -

The Joy of Bureaucracy
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09sc0t5

Authority

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/09/toppling-authority-populism

All Change: navigating the new political disruption

Good Morning!

Book 18 - Christopher Hitchens "And Yet..."

Christopher Hitchens "And Yet..." (Atlantic Books)




This is another of those books I dipped into occasionally over the last few months. These pieces were never meant to be read one after the other - it's Hitchens the journalist here slightly less than Hitchens the essayist, and so, for different publications, he repeats the clever expressions and bon mots he used in one article for the next on the same theme. The result is a book for completists more than casual readers; if like me you're still greatly enamoured of the Hitchens approach, it's worth a read, especially if you have read his Guardian essays and other periodical pieces.

He was snarky and erudite. Some essays resonated much more with me, while others seemed needlessly self-absorbed and overly critical and thus an uneven posthumous publication of a collection.

Good Night