nude labour (Servants of the People - Andrew Rawnsley)

Member Name: pje

Product:	Servants of the People - Andrew Rawnsley
Date:	05/07/01 (92 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Amusing and revealing.

Disadvantages: It makes government seem like a poor sit-com or soap opera.

"My mission is to destroy the Conservative Party"

No, that's not what William Hague said when he became leader of the Tories, those were the words of Tony Blair. Sadly, as with many other promises he's made, we're still waiting...


Andrew Rawnsley writes the weekly column called Inside Politics in The Observer. It's required reading for anyone with an interest in British politics, which is almost nobody judging by the turn-out at the general election. He is also the current newspaper Columnist of the Year.

In Servants of the People, Rawnsley exposes the inside story
of New Labour's first term in office. It is based on large amounts of "private information" from sources "close to" the government, including "someone who has an extremely good claim to know the mind of the PM". So that's not Tony Blair then...

About Blair's apparent lack of confidence he says that: "his first instinct when confronted with most choices was to blur them."

At times this book is quite funny, for example, when the Chancellor made a speech ruling out joining the Euro, Peter Mandelson rang Tony Blur to ask: "Did you authorise this?"
To which the PM replied, a la Jim Hacker, "I don't know."

There were moments when Blair found his mettle though.
There is a lengthy, detailed account of the war in Kosovo, where, in contrast to Bill Clinton who vacillated over the thorny issue
of deploying ground troops, Blair adopted an unwavering moral position, and grasped the nettle, declaring "this is shit or bust."

The difficult negotiations leading to the Good Friday agreement are also chronicled. Enter Mo Mowlam, the first Secretary of State for Northern Ireland to tell Ian Paisley to f*** off. Not that she was taking sides you understand, she also told Gerry Adams to f*** off - in Gaelic. Now that's the so
rt of even-handed negotiation I can respect!


After being elected, Labour had set in motion an American style government machine - more West Wing than Whitehall,
the trouble was they weren't all spinning in the same direction...

New Labour had been very much the product of the triangular relationship between Blair, Brown and Mandelson. Rawnsley paints a picture of Brown still in a sulk about being gazumped
by Blair for the leadership. Brown has his own clique of lackeys (don't they all) and so a battle of attrition quickly developed between two unholy trinities. In the blue corner is: Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell and in the slightly less blue corner: Gordon Brown, Charlie Whelan and Ed Balls - with the two camps bickering like a couple going through a divorce.

The childish behaviour in the corridors of power is extraordinary. For example, Mr. & Mrs. Prescott moved into a grace-and-favour apartment previously occupied by the next leader of the Conservative Party, Michael Portillo...

(No, I'm not predicting that he's going to win this time, or any time, but whoever wins he'll still be regarded as the next leader!)
Anyway, the Prescotts found that a permanent secretary had removed every stick of furniture. So when the same Sir Humphrey (Sir Richard Mottram) subsequently became Two-Jag's permanent secretary, Prezza personally showed him into his new office - which was empty, save for one orange packing crate to sit on.
Ah yes, jolly japes and expensive wallpaper, that's government!


The Chancellor held the purse strings extremely tightly in the first couple of years of the government. But a politician is a politician
is a politician. When the Ministry of Defence urgently required £201m to refit a nuclear submarine before penalty payments were incurred (the Tories had put it off until after the election -
I think it's called creative ac
countancy) Brown refused...
...until he was told that the refit would be done at Rosyth -
which is in his own constituency, and he did a quick volte-face.

But then to be successful politician you have to be pragmatic.
(Let's hope no-one tells the Tories that, it would spoil all the fun!)
"What matters is what works" Tony Blair said before the election. Wrong Tony - what matters is what DOESN'T work. D'Uh!

Which brings me to the Millennium Dome fiasco...
I can't even begin to tell you how funny the chapter on the Dome is - unbelievably Rawnsley has only allocated six pages to it.
There's enough of a farce there for a Tom Sharpe novel.

And who do you associate with the Dome? Yep, Peter Mandelson. Dubbed a starf***er by Rupert Murdoch because of the way
he loved to socialize with the glitterati, his behaviour is bizarre. When he was accidentally outed by Matthew Parris on Newsnight he tried to barricade himself in the closet by leaning on the BBC. Even more stupidly he chose to keep the loan he obtained from Geoffrey Robinson secret from his friends Blair and Campbell, even though his enemies in the Brown camp knew all about it!

Mandy's (first) resignation letter began with the words:
"I can scarcely believe I am writing this letter..." Quite amusing when you know that it was actually written by Alistair Campbell!
Campbell also composed Ron Davies's resignation letter, who then signed it, apparently without reading it, while he was being interviewed by the police!


This book made headlines by revealing that during the brouhaha over Bernie Ecclestone's £1m donation to the Labour Party, Gordon Brown, caught unprepared on the Today programme,
told a big fat porky - saying that he knew nothing about it.
"They'll get me for this" he screamed at officials,
"I lied. If this gets out I'll be destr
oyed."
It did. He wasn't. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on, bra.

The (updated?) paperback version of Servants of the People
is due to hit the shops on July 11th.

Summary: