In an article last week John Rentoul listed his 8 political books of the year. Biteback books tallied a whole half of the nominations. Read on to find out which Biteback titles made it into his shortlist, and why!
Politics: New Labour might be gone, but it hasn't been forgotten
Independent on Sunday - Sunday 4 Dec.
by John Rentoul
...Frustratingly, because Brown's was even more dysfunctional than Blair's, Darling quickly found himself outside the real decision-making circle. Because both Brown and Ed Balls are yet to write a memoir, we have to rely on outsiders to piece together what went on in the last three years of Labour government. Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge's book, Brown at 10, was published last year, but this year's revised paperback edition (Biteback, £14.99) is the one to buy. It has some important new revelations: as the Blairites always suspected, Brown encouraged "loans for peerages" allegations as a way of undermining Blair.
For an oblique take on the Brown years that will have you laughing out loud on the bus, Tom Harris's Why I'm Right ... And Everyone Else is Wrong (Biteback, £9.99) is a gem. Harris is a no-nonsense Blairite MP who was initially kept on by Brown as a transport minister but sacked for thought-crime in October 2008. He was the first minister to publish a blog and this book is a collection of posts with an added commentary which includes the story of Peter Mandelson's offer to bring him back into government – to stop him calling for Brown to go. They read as freshly as on the day they were written, with the ageless wisdom of revisionist social democracy and a side-commentary on Doctor Who.
Talking of time travel, let us turn to books about the political future. Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre produced an accomplished biography, Ed: The Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader (Biteback, £17.99). It is well written, well researched and highly readable, let down only by the dullness of its subject. In particular, the breathless account of how Ed led the students in a walk-out from formal dinner in his Oxford college succeeds neither as heroics or farce.
More useful, one suspects, is The Purple Book, edited by Robert Philpot of Progress, a centrist Labour faction (Biteback, £9.99). Such collections of essays tend to be dreary and quickly out of date, but this one lifts itself above the morass. Its contributors are at least obsessed by the right question: How can the Labour Party persuade voters it is pragmatic about market forces when the capitalists seem responsible for so much bad stuff?
John Rentoul is chief political commentator for The Independent on Sunday