Archive for gordon brown
Brown at 10: the authoritative account – which lays into Ed Balls
When it first came out Brown at 10 by Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge was extremely well received for its authoritative detail and the revised paperback edition maintains that standard well. With Seldon being one of the founders of the modern school of contemporary history, it is no surprise that the book follows the thorough, [...]
The failure that is the UK government on YouTube
Mention “YouTube” and “British government” and “failure” to most people interested in online politics or comms and the chances are they will think of Gordon Brown and that YouTube film with the unusual smiles. There is however a quieter failure, going on every day and hitting many Whitehall departments. It is quite simply this: lots of [...]
Explaining Cameron’s Coalition: politics as seen through the eyes of MORI polls
Explaining Cameron’s Coalition is the latest in the series of general election analysis by MORI’s Robert Worcester and Roger Mortimore, this time joined by two other authors. The book is therefore very much the tale of the 2005-2010 Parliament and subsequent general election seen through the eyes of MORI’s opinion polling, with an often pungent [...]
Who is Ed Miliband?
Authors of the best accounts of the New Labour years delved deeply into the rival Brownite and Blairite versions of events before coming to their own conclusions. Those who did not frequently ended up with embarrassingly lopsided and inaccurate accounts. Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre, the authors of Ed: The Milibands and the making of [...]
Government takes action over ‘vulture funds’
When Labour were in power, Liberal Democrats regularly attacked the government for its inaction over so-called vulture funds (that is, in this context, financial funds who buy up debt from poor countries and try to make a profit out of it). For example, then International Development spokesperson Lynne Featherstone said, Gordon Brown has said this [...]
Sharon Bowles named most influential Brit in global financial regulation
Sharon Bowles, Liberal Democrat Euro-MP for South East England, is the highest placed British person in the GFS Power 50 list of the most influential figures in global financial regulation. The list is voted on by readers of Global Financial Strategy, and Sharon Bowles came out twentieth due to her role as Chair of the Economic and [...]
5 Days to Power: could there have been a Lab-Lib Dem deal?
Conservative MP Rob Wilson’s book on the formation of a coalition government in May 2010, 5 Days to Power: The Journey to Coalition Britain, plays up the drama of the events, talking of how “Gordon Brown and David Cameron were both determined to do whatever was necessary to secure the position of Prime Minister” as [...]
22 Days in May by David Laws – book review
Many insider accounts have already appeared of the events retold in David Laws’s book 22 Days in May: The Birth of the Lib Dem-Conservative Coalition. It is therefore one of the book’s strengths that not only is it written in a lively style which gives some freshness to the now familiar sequence of events but [...]
The British General Election of 2010: a book worth reading
There are two simple tests I have for books that recount events I was in some way involved in: do they accurately retell events that I have direct first-hand knowledge of and do they tell me something new about events I was one step removed from? If a book pasts both those tests, chances are [...]
Just how bizarre will the Brown / Blair revelations get?
The more that comes out about how Tony Blair and Gordon Brown behaved (or perhaps more accurately, how Gordon Brown behaved towards Tony Blair) the more you wonder quite what world they were living in. Here, courtesy of The Guardian’s Nicholas Watt, is one of the latest revelations of the sort of behaviour that would [...]
