My Top 10 Political Books

Political blogging is an essentially ephemeral phenomemnon, but a good political book lasts for ever. Here's my Top 10 reads.

1. The Time of My Life - Denis Healey. Beautifully-written autobiog from the best Prime Minister we never had.

2. Friends and Rivals - Giles Radice. Superb triple biography of Labour's original modernisers - Healey, Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland.

3. Diaries - Alan Clark. The original and best account of the high politics of the Thatcher era, which now all seems strangely far-off.

4. Peter Mandelson - Donald Macintyre. Don never even said hello when I was in the Lobby but his biog of Mandy is a masterpiece of objectivity.

5. Alastair Campbell and the Rise of the Media Class - Peter Oborne. Devastating expose of the man and his methods from a true comrade-in-arms.

6. Prime Minister Portillo and Other Things that Never Happened - Iain Dale and Duncan Brack. Book of counterfactuals I wish I'd thought of first.

7. The Ashdown Diaries Vol 2 - Paddy Ashdown. Detailed chronicle of the abortive Lib-Lab "project" and Ashdown's ultimate disappointment.

8. Servants of the People - Andrew Rawnsley. The "official" version of the world according to New Labour, 1997-2004.

9. Blair - Anthony Seldon. Brilliantly conceived biography looking at the PM through his relationships with the 20 key figures in his life.

10. The Autobiography - John Major. Okay, so he should have mentioned Edwina, but ghostwriter Julian Glover did a wonderful job with this.

In answer to my orginal question.....

....the Make Socialism History blog has carried out a poll on whether Hilary Armstrong is the worst chief whip ever. Here's the result.

To be fair to MSH, they did acknowledge their debt to me for this idea in a previous post.

English knives out for Brown

According to Charlie Clarke and others, Gordon Brown is now virtually "Joint Prime Minister" with Tony Blair, though as he perfectly well knows, in our system of government such an idea is a constitutional nonsense.

The more of this sort of thing I hear, the more I am tending to the view that Brown is being set up by the Blairites - an idea I explored in a previous post last week and may well return to....

Meanwhile, supporters of the Campaign for an English Parliament, of which I am also a supporter, have launched a campaign to stop Gordon Brown becoming Prime Minister on the grounds that, as a Scot, he has no mandate in England.

This image of Gordon Brown currently appears on the CEP newsblog, along with a lengthy comment from me and response from the blog's author, Gareth Young.

Although I support the CEP's overall aims I think there is a rather unpleasant and personal overtone to this campaign. It doesn't seem so very far away from the sort of "send the buggers home" saloon-bar racism which still exists in some inner-city areas where racial tensions are high.

Gareth's argument is that until we have an English Parliament, we can't have a Scottish Prime Minister of the whole of the UK, but this seems a bizarre point of view to take if Gordon is the best candidate for PM in all other respects.

That said, Gordon could stop this sort of sabre-rattling in its tracks by saying a bit more about how he plans to tackle the West Lothian Question if and when he finally does become Prime Minister.

As I have said on previous posts, one of the opposition parties is going to come out in favour of an English Parliament before too long, because the status quo simply cannot be justified. Brown should pre-empt them by promising an English Constitutional Convention to look at the whole issue in the round.

February 15 update: Iain Dale's Diary is also inviting comments on this post.

February 16 update: More hostile comment on this post can be found at the CEP Cambs blog and The England Project. Some posters on CEP Cambs seem to think I am some kind of wealthy academic stuck in my ivory tower - if only they knew!

We hate it when our friends become successful....

...was of course originally the title of a Morrissey song. But it applies equally well to the world of journalism as Lib Dem leadership contender Chris Huhne is now finding to his cost.

Huhne, an ex-journalist, seems to have a fair few enemies in the media, which doesn't surprise me knowing what a bitchy, backstabbing world it is.

In a column published on Saturday, the normally scrupulously-fair minded commentator Matthew Parris described Huhne as "mysteriously and indefinably ghastly."

I think if people with Matthew's sort of power as an opinion-former are going to throw that sort of mud around, they really ought to say more by way of explanation, and I have written to the Times to say so.

But Parris is not alone. In this space filler at the end of his Observer column on Sunday, Nick Cohen dredges up some ancient story about Huhne driving a flash motor in the 1980s and contrasting this with his support for green taxes today.

And even the Daily Telegraph, whose esteemed political correspondent Brendan Carlin was the first to reveal the Huhne leadership bid, has come out against him in this editorial published on Friday, accusing him of "duplicity."

Against that, Polly Toynbee in the Guardian last week constitutes a rather lone supportive voice in the national media.

No doubt there is always some resentment towards poachers-turned-gamekeepers, but the level of media abuse being directed at Huhne in this contest is well in excess of his opponents.

Why it has to be Huhne

I've been plugging the claims of Chris Huhne for the Lib Dem leadership on this blog for some weeks now but I'd not had a chance to do so in my newspaper columns or podcast until the Dunfermline East result gave the issue a fresh topicality.

To read my detailed explanation of why Huhne is the man, click here, or alternatively, if you want to hear it, click here.

To the hills....

I'm off here this weekend - Llanthony Priory in South Wales for the stag do of my oldest friend for whom I'm best-manning in April. Be back Monday assuming I survive the whitewater rafting!