Damian McBride: are his blog posts in book form worth a read?

Melding 21st and 15th century technologies by collecting up blog posts in book form rarely ends in great triumph  (including, ahem, this).

Collections of newspaper columns from a particular pundit often used to make for moderately successful books, but that was back in the days when, aside from the dedicated archives user, newspaper columns pretty much disappeared the day after they appeared. With blog posts hanging around online for repeated reading months if not years after their appearance, why pay money for a book version of them?

Disgraced Labour spin doctor Damian McBride’s blogging collection, Omnirambles, makes a decent stab at answering that question because the best of his writing is often lengthy. The book itself mixes up both long and short form, but it is the long form that comes closest to making sense of book format.

The blog posts all date from after McBride’s fall from grace and his public apologies for his thuggish and often deceitful behaviour.

As I wrote of his memoirs, Power Trip:

McBride’s tactics and style are to be reviled. What he says about politics and the media however can still be learnt from.

This book too, along with more personal pieces about his family and passions, contains much insight about the media, politics and what goes on inside the Labour Party.

If you’re wanting read one book by him, Power Trip is the better bet. But if you’re interested in hearing more – and even if you’ve read some of the blog posts already – Omnirambles is worth a graze through too.

Got a view on this review? Then please rate it on Amazon.

Buy Omnirambles by Damian McBride here.

Note: a review copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher.