A rather pleasing review of Brown at 10 by Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge appeared in The Australian on Saturday, penned by Frank Carrigan, lecturer in law at Macquarie University in Sydney.
Carrigan opens with a discussion on the optimum length of time for which one should wait in the political wings, biding one’s time, before striding forward to take centre stage and seize the coveted position of Prime Minister out of the sweaty paws of your predecessor: advance too early and your critics will chastise you with accusations of inexperience and naivety; hang around too long and your buoyant exuberance and belief in your power to achieve real political change, and for the better, begins to wane, so that by the time you finally tread the boards your agility, energy and vigour has dissipated. You are a shadow of your former self. Pretty depressing, if you ask me.
Brown at 10 holds a mirror up to the shadow in question – Gordon Brown – providing what Carrigan describes as an ‘unflinching portrait of someone who hungered for the highest office but found only despair and insecurity, and ultimately descended into a psychological hell’. Nice.
And the problem – for Brown, that is – is that thanks to the authors' ‘meticulous’ research, garnered from ‘voluminous’ primary sources, and their ‘neutral and value-free tone’, it’s hard to dismiss this book’s portrayal of Brown in this way as simply a malicious, gleeful and inflated revel in someone else’s misery. Rather, it is an accurate snapshot of Brown at No. 10.
Although my description of it as a snapshot is probably underselling it a bit. For Seldon and Lodge have produced something of a tome: a thorough, weighty and analytical investigation which, for Carrigan at least, is ‘written in the finest tradition of empiricist history’. That means it’s good.
So what are you waiting for? Brown at 10 is available here, priced £20, and you can read Frank Carrigan’s review here, for free.