Tired and Emotional

Next off the pile of books waiting to be read is Peter Paterson's Tired and Emotional, the life of Lord George Brown. I'm not often one for political biography but am a specialist in Jeremy Thorpe Studies and once read Ben Pimlott's Harold Wilson, who was a bit of a favourite as I understand he is of Keir Starmer. I thought George Brown would be funny but I was wrong. It's grim, unpleasant and acrimonious, like politics and the internal workings of the Labour Party (like the Conservatives) generally are.

Perhaps Paterson, being a raffish-looking journalist from the Telegraph, Spectator and Mail as well as The New Statesman, couldn't be expected to be a sympathetic biographer but it's hard to see how anybody else would have been a great deal more so. The hard drinking certainly was no help but his abrasive personality and inferiority complex in the company of intellectuals were as much the cause of his haplessness. We take for granted his ambition to which a wife is sacrificed in the same tradition as writers as selfish as Thomas Hardy, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin. We also realize that such ambition results in much underhand maneouvering but George isn't as good as that as Harold. An appalling picture of all the major Labour figures of the 1950's and 60's - Bevin, Bevan, Gaitskell, Wilson, Crossman, Callaghan, Brown and more - masquerading as 'brothers' while forever plotting against each other makes Boris Johnson, Gove, Sunak, Truss and the rest of the sorry litany of recent Conservatives only look like the latest version of a long-established template for a shambles and no way to run a darts team never mind a country.

George Brown only belonged to the Labour Party because of his impoverished beginnings, as well he might, but he otherwise belongs to that demographic of working class right-wingers who are mis-fits in their professed allegiance, populist at the expense of principle, anti-semitic and, in his case at least, a gift to the right wing press and a liability.

But there's nothing new under the sun in such matters. Having got halfway with it, I'll persevere in the hope that perhaps the pathetic figure he becomes by the end elicits some sympathy. And then I can move on to something more edifying, making a mental note not to be tempted in to Thatcher, Blair or anybody else. Such a parcel of rogues in a nation.