It is, for sure, a curious billet doux -– less like a bunch of roses than a handful of thorns. Comparing, however tangentially, your hero with Cesare Borgia -– the bully-boy who organised orgies to entertain his father, the Pope – could be viewed as the most back-handed of compliments. But the problem is more fundamental than that: it is Machiavelli himself. In trying to establish the reputation of his hero (and thus his own), Powell has to contend with the black legend that surrounds Old Nick.

He opens by announcing that ‘Machiavelli is much misunderstood’, which is akin to Diana Mitford recalling how amusing a chap was Hitler. Powell wants to insist that the author he emulates has unfairly gained opprobrium for telling things as they are, for straight-speaking, and for not blinking when being radical was what was needed. It sounds that Machiavelli was like how Powell wanted New Labour in power to be.

Yet, Powell’s use of Machiavelli hints at the depth of the problem. At one point, Powell declares that there are five qualities required in ‘a great leader’ -– number three being charisma, and the last (but certainly not the least) ‘charm’.

Powell divides sharply between those two terms: for charisma, he gives Weber the obligatory namecheck and means the aura which comes with assumed authority. For ‘charm’, he adds a supposed synonym: ‘sinuousness’. What precisely he has in mind is made clear when he goes on to bemoan that commentators see charm as ‘a sort of black magic’. What he is talking about is an ability to persuade that slides into the power to deceive. Machiavelli might have approved of the skill, but it is a mark of how Powell feels unable to be as blunt as his forerunner that he resorts to the comfort of euphemisms.

A generous response to Powell’s work would congratulate him for going further than the most popular Machiavellians and venturing beyond The Prince. He does lace his book with quotations from Machiavelli’s more substantial Discourses on the First Decade of Livy. It is The Prince, though, that provides the ordering principle to Powell’s book and there is no hint that the author sees any inconsistencies between Machiavelli’s best-known works.

Indeed, he sees neither inconsistency nor irony. Early on, writing ‘in defence of Machiavelli’, he rolls off a list of quotations of authors who have praised The Prince. He includes Rousseau who, as Powell says, described the little work as ‘the book of republicans’, but the phrase is taken out of context. As is explained in The Social Contract, Rousseau saw Machiavelli as hiding his true meaning for fear of Medici reprisals, while revealing his intention to those who had ears to hear by the choice of Borgia as ‘his detestable hero’. There is a long history to reading of The Prince as disingenuous or ironic; Powell, in taking the book at face value, fails to grapple with how sly Machiavelli might actually have been.

Why, then, does Powell make so much of his use of Machiavelli? He says at the outset that he does not want his book to be ‘another memoir of the Blair years’ – though, in that, he fails.

It is perhaps the fate of all who have once negotiated power, that they later find that they themselves have become otiose and so hark back to their past, like Scipio and Hannibal discussing their martial merits in retirement. Powell cannot completely rise above the need to settle scores: to begin the rehabilitation of Blair, and to help unravel whatever good repute Gordon Brown might have. He strains to give his personal emotions an intellectual justification -– not to mention a wider relevance (otherwise known as selling power) -– by ordering his recollection not by date but by an analysis that takes as its starting-point The Prince.

The result, though, reads as oddly disappointed: he served the most successful Labour leader in history but his book exudes the chagrin of hindsight. He seems to wish that the government in which he worked had been leaner -– and much meaner. At heart, his message is that, whatever dark arts it mastered, New Labour was not Machiavellian enough.

There is another insight that drives his use of his source: his belief that a prime minister is not so distant from a Renaissance prince as is usually imagined. A PM is necessarily surrounded by a court in which sage advice can all too easily be drowned out by the yes-men, the flatterers. He also does not have a monopoly of power, which is, instead, dispersed among the cabinet ministers, whom Powell depicts as ‘feudal barons’.

Potentially interesting points, but ones for which Powell might have been helped if he had raised his eyes up from The Prince and looked at some other works: Thomas More or John of Salisbury are more outspoken than Machiavelli about the vicious circle of court life, and any comparison of too-powerful ministers with medieval nobles could have taken as its starting-point the chapter on ‘overmighty subjects’ in John Fortescue. But, then again, The New Fortescue would not have made as catchy a title.

What Powell clearly relishes in Machiavelli is his ability to draw out a general truth from the examples he deploys. He attempts to emulate that, peppering his work with dicta, usually opened by ‘a prudent leader’ or ‘a wise prime minister’.

But some of Powell’s dicta would have left Machiavelli shaking his head. To give just one example: Powell’s advice is driven by a simple dichotomy between a ‘strong’ and a ‘weak’ leader (where, for weak, read Brown). Yet, Machiavelli, particularly in The Discourses, had a keen sense of how circumstances can define the right path: in other words, strength and weakness are not simply born of innate qualities or learnt skills, they also change with the context. The key virtue for Machiavelli was prudence, but not in the way that Powell would have it. As with New Labour, what’s ‘new’ is not necessarily better.

Other insights would have had Machiavelli scratching his scalp. Powell was so intimately involved in the minutiae of running Number 10 that he cannot but want to reform the mechanisms of central government and he has some detailed prescriptions for that. At the same time, they reduce the work’s ambitions to the very local.

Powell mentions once Francesco Guicciardini, most famous for sharing with his lower-born contemporary, Machiavelli, a sharp cynicism about politics, expressed in his histories. Guicciardini also wrote a Dialogue on the Government of Florence which delved into the details of the how to overhaul the instruments of rule in his city. The impression left from reading this book is that Powell wants to emulate Machiavelli but he ends up being more like Guicciardini.

* David Rundle is a Liberal Democrat councillor in Oxford, who blogs on politics at de moribus liberalibus and on Renaissance history at bonæ litteræ.

Italian journalists, by the way, haven’t written up yesterday’s events as if it were yet another humdrum day in the dysfunctional life of their nation’s politics. They sense something ‘un-Italian’ about it all, one paper describing it as like a scene from The Sopranos.

And the events in the Senate had an aura of over-the-top, couldn’t-happen-in-real life TV drama: the smallest governing party which resigned from the coalition because its leader was implicated in a corruption case (he, by the way, was Justice Minister) and which therefore caused the confidence vote, split with one of its three senators trying to vote to save the centre-left government, until he got roughed up by his party colleagues. He was stretchered out of the hall.

The question for Italy is now: is their country ungovernable?

Prodi says it is ungovernable, under the present electoral system. He – with the equivalent of the CBI and, seemingly, the President on his side – argues that reform needs to precede any move to go to the polls. The issue is not so much the electoral laws Berlusconi rushed through in his last gasp as PM, which bolstered whoever won the election by giving them extra seats in the Lower House, but a deeper problem. It’s the ‘perfect bicameralism’ of the constitution which has caused the most recent crises. Twice Prodi has had to fight a confidence vote, twice he’s won in the Lower House, twice he’s lost in the Senate.

The question for us is: how can we make our parliamentary system something close to a representative democracy and avoid the imperfections of perfect bicameralism? We would like to see an elected Upper House, on STV. We should surely want to give it teeth, rather than keeping it as the neutered beast it is now. We would want to avoid the provision for life senators that occurs in Italy – though that provision gave the Prime Minister a glimmer of hope that he could remain and stability be achieved.

But would we enjoy the consequences? Will we end up throwing punches or popping corks?

* David Rundle is Liberal Democrat deputy leader of Oxford City Council, and blogs at de moribus liberalibus.

It’s going to tell us how we can regain the fervour and the achievement of our New Liberal forefathers – how, in the new millennium, we can protect the inheritance of the welfare state which our party and our thinkers created, and how we can best continue to strive for the fairer society all liberals want. Trouble is, Reinventing the State can’t live up to that billing.

It’s a heavy-weight contender, nearing 400 pages, and with 22 chapters from 21 contributors. It has some excellent chapters: pick it up, turn to the back and read the impressive, clear-headed conclusions by Steve Webb and Jo Holland. If you like your prose persuasively measured, be warmed by Chris Huhne’s liberal narrative, ‘The Case for Localism’. Or, if you prefer a text which is angry and splendidly strident, be converted by Paul Holmes on ‘The Limits of the Market.’ But, as a whole, Reinventing the State is both too sprawling and, paradoxically, too limited to hit the mark.

This is a problem of all books which are somewhere between political thought and political policy: they have to be a snapshot, a work of the moment with in-built obsolescence. They necessarily lack a longer perspective. This does not mean that they do not mention history – the liberal tradition, as defined in its fully-developed form of New Liberalism, effuses this book and, in particular, David Howarth’s knowledgeable chapter.

But what they find harder to do it is to appreciate their own place in that historical context. This matters because, in the case of Reinventing the State, it means what is being said is being undersold.

Taken together, the chapters here are saying something much more than that the market is imperfect. As Liberals, we are wise to the fact that the invisible hand is often doing something furtive under the table. Yet, we also recognise that in some circumstances the market mechanism is the least bad option – as the authors in this volume acknowledge.

But the key contribution of Reinventing the State is the claim that the circumstances demand that we roll back the frontiers of the market, where cowboys and the lawless thrive. Our society is in crisis. That crisis is talked about in some chapters as a moral or psychological malaise.

Whether you buy that or not, Duncan Brack makes a strong case for a crisis of inequality, the legacy of the Thatcher / Blair years. In that situation, this is the moment to intervene, the reason we need the state to act. But that begs the question, what ‘state’, what level of government?

As you would expect in a volume by Liberals, there is a theme running through several chapters of devolving real power to local authorities and the communities they serve. Some of the writers seem to want less to reinvent the state than to reconfigure it or even dismantle parts of it.

What, surprisingly, there is much less of here is talk of the competencies of the European Union, or of the devolved Parliaments in Britain. As Liberals, we know that the problems our society faces can not all be addressed by Westminster. What it would be good to hear more about is how our MPs can divest themselves of the powers they have, both upwards to a reformed Brussels, and downwards to Edinburgh, Cardiff and town halls across the country.

Perhaps that is asking for a big book to have been even bigger. But it is surely where the opportunities for Liberals lie in the early twenty-first century.

* David Rundle is a Lib Dem councillor in Oxford. He blogs at de moribus liberalibus.

UPDATE: One of the chapters from Reinventing the State was written by The Voice’s Mark Pack and is available to read online here.