Andrew Rawnsley

Rawnsley has studied in detail the second and third terms of the New Labour project and has interviewed hundreds of politicians and civil servants both on and off the record.

This a monumental book in physical size and scope. The main focus of his gaze is the towering icons of Blair and Brown. This pair, along with Mandleson created the New Labour project and made the party electable. Even as they were still celebrating the win of the second election the cracks in the veneer were starting to show. Shortly after they were elected the tragedy of 9/11 happened, Rawnsley goes into lots of detail on the subsequent wars and the way that a labour politician could be associated with a very right wing American politician, and how the members of his party were horrified with this relationship, and the British general public were disbelieving as well. The accusation is made that Blair agreed to commit British troops to the war regardless. The fallout from WMD, dodgy dossiers and the inevitable Whitehall whitewashes has tainted politics since. Blair has an amazing ability to capture the moment with a correctly judged phrase. Whist he was very politically astute, what he did not have was any political ideology.

A lot of the book is concerned with the promises made by Blair to Brown on the succession. Various deals were made between them, and the public had the impression that Blair never kept these, but Rawnsley reveals that these were deals, and Brown rarely kept to his side of it. The rows that these two had were spectacular, but as Rawnsley said every time they looked into the abyss then they would find common ground and keep on. The Iraq war was his downfall, and the lies that he perpetrated to bring us to the war are shameful. However he was a key player in the Northern Ireland peace process, and it would not be where is today without him.

Brown was a schemer and a plotter, who surrounded himself with acolytes to do his dirty work. He would arrange for them to brief and spin again supporters of Blair and when he was Prime Minister even against members of his own party. One of them, Damien McBride, was particularly unpleasant, and we are still getting the fallout from his recent book. Even though he claimed to be uninterested in the media, he comes across in the book as even more sensitive to any bad headlines, throwing massive fits when the press savaged him. Brown was subject to frequent rages, and staff in Number 10 would often be the recipients of these. The cabinet secretary had to warn him several times to keep his temper in check. He didn’t come across as someone nice to work with, and if he felt that you had bretrayed him then you would be ostracised. My favourite quote at the time was he waited 10 years for a job that he couldn’t do...

It is a fascinating book, and Rawnsley has managed to convey the way that this government did and didn’t work. In the end the New Labour ‘project’ imploded spectacularly, and has forever changed the face of British politics… (más)

I have read Andrew Rawnsley's accounts of the Blair and Brown Labour administration that governed Britain from 1997 until 2010 in the wrong order. Having lived through the period, however, and having worked in Whitehall throughout most of that period, I don't think that reading the second volume first spoiled the story as I was already pretty confident that I knew the outcome!

I had, however, already forgotten a lot of the details. Reading this book, I was reminded of the utter weakness and lack of organisation of the Conservative Party following Blair's landslide electoral victory in 1997, that it was unable to offer any constructive challenge at the end of the first term in 2001.

There were some considerable achievements for New Labour during that first term, but Rawnsley's account reveals the relentless internecine struggles within the Cabinet. Right from the election victory in May 1997, Blair and Brown were at loggerheads, with the latter resolving to go his own way, and put his stamp on the Cabinet. Rawnsley clearly favours Blair over Brown, though he is not reluctant to criticise the former, too.

Rawnsley offers some startling revelations about the utter lack of empathy between Harriet Harman, Secretary of State for Social Security, and her 'junior' minister, Frank Field (who had been led by Blair to believe that he would be given the Cabinet level post), both of whom repeatedly went running to Downing Street to complain about the actions of the other. Of course, Frank Field (now Sir Frank) had always been a bit of a maverick, frequently at odds with the official party line, but that very individuality perhaps always precluded him from a Cabinet position. He did, after all, show himself willing to work with the Coalition after 2010 in the interests of pursuing a policy that he considered right, regardless of partisan party labels.

An even more divisive figure was Peter (now Lord) Mandelson. Seen by many as the architect of New Labour and the eminence grise responsible for making Labour electable once more, he had initially been a close confidant of Gordon Brown. That all changed, however, and as Blair became party leader, Mandelson moved ever more closely into his camp. As a consequence, by the time Labour came into government, Brown and Mandelson were incapable of exchanging a civil word.

Mandelson's contribution to that first Labour Government term will now probably best be recalled for having to resign from the Cabinet … twice. Having pledged to wash away the tainted memory of eighteen years and four electoral terms of Conservative Government, which had come to be associated with sleaze in the public perception, the New labour administration seemed to lurch from one scandal to another. Having already resigned over a questionable and previously undisclosed loan from fellow Cabinet member Geoffrey Robinson, Mandelson was lucky to be allowed back into the Cabinet (as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland) without the ratification of a renewed electoral mandate. It seems particularly bizarre, therefore, that he should be sufficiently reckless to allow himself to be brought down again through the injudicious endorsement of applications for British passports by the immensely rich Hinduja brothers.
Rawnsley writes in a lucid and entertaining style, and has clearly had access to conversations and documentation from many (perhaps most) of the principal protagonists. I would be interested to read Rawnsley's take on the subsequent internal travails of the Coalition government.… (más)

Like most regular buyers and readers of books, I have come to take with a pinch of salt the reviewers’ plaudits that the publishers liberally strew over the covers of their wares. One such comment on the cover of Andrew Rawnsley’s accounts of the last two terms of the Blair/Brown New Labour administration suggested it was almost a Shakespearean account. I immediately dismissed that as representing the flightier end of PR hyperbole, but I was mistaken.

This is a completely gripping account that had my alternately smirking at some of the bizarre presumptions to which Blair and Brown, along with their respective coteries of henchmen, succumbed, and then almost shouting in rage at some of the more ghastly errors. Of course, that dichotomy could be found in accounts blessed with the pellucid view of hindsight about almost every administration, regardless of political complexion. In the case of the new Labour governments that held sway from 1997 until 2010, there was, however, the distressing lacquer of smugness and odious self-satisfaction among the lead players that lends its own squalid sheen.

Rawnsley has that happy gift of being able to convey different political ideologies and convictions with great clarity. He is, after all, one of Britain’s best established political journalists. It is also clear that he was more sympathetic, both personally and politically, to Tony Blair than to Gordon Brown. The latter emerges from these pages as an emotionally barren bully, haunted by the paranoia obsession that everyone around him was intent upon doing him down. He did, indeed, have a lot of enemies among his Cabinet colleagues, though it is unclear to what extent those enmities were of his own making.

Rawnsley is not slow to criticise Blair, either – there is no hint of hagiography here – and from this account there is little room to manoeuvre away from culpability over the decision to go to war with Iraq without suitably robust evidence.

Rawnsley’s account benefits from the vast range of people involved with the events that he describes to whom he was able to speak directly. Over the years he interviewed most of the principal participants in British politics during the three electoral terms for which New Labour was in power. The book certainly reads more like journalism than academic history, but that is, after all, Rawnsley’s metier. It is a large book, but the story is compelling, and the narrative fairly fizzes along.

I have found myself reading far more non-fiction books than usual this year, and this has been one of the most entertaining and informative of them.… (más)

This is a tale on par with anything told by Shakespeare. Gordon Brown, the brilliant Chancellor whose hubris evicted Tony Blair so that he might become Prime Minister. In a party which professed to support the best candidate as opposed to the outmoded Conservatives, Brown felt that he should have become Labour Leader instead of Blair, based upon seniority.

Brown had all the charisma of a three week old kipper. Difficulties with his vision, caused by a rugby injury in youth, hampered his limited media appeal and a combination of paranoia and an uncontrolled temper made him the worst possible choice as leader but also the last person to whom one would express such an opinion.

This eminently readable account of Labour from the beginning of TB's second government until the day that Brown walked out of Downing Street makes even an arch Social Democrat, such as myself, grateful that Cameron and Clegg created a hotch-potch alliance to remove him.

I have read most of the biographies of the main characters, which were rushed out following the defeat of New Labour. Some are good, some less so but, this work stitches together the nearest story to the absolute truth that we are ever likely to see. Andrew Rawnsley seems to have spoken to all the main protagonists - and many of the bit part characters, whose story may not be worthy of their own book, but shines an undeniable light of verisimilitude on the action. Whilst nobody comes out untarnished, not Blair, Cameron, Clegg, Mandelson or Campbell; the real villain is clearly Gordon Brown. His tale takes him through a lingering death of a thousand cuts as he alienated the country section by section. It becomes almost a morality tale, be nice to people on the way up because you might meet them again, on the way down....… (más)