Category Archives: Books

Mark Pack

Jo Grimond: Towards the sound of gunfire

By Mark Pack | Tue 26th June 2012 - 3:50 pm

A better understanding of Jo Grimond’s life is always a healthy corrective to some of the cartoon caricatures about right-wing lurches and Thatcherite policies that sometimes get thrown around over the views of contemporary Liberal Democrats.

Grimond was, after all, a man who talked of himself as being on the centre-left and who pushed for a progressive realignment of politics that would see a new centre-left party supplant Labour. Off and on feelers went out to those in Labour ranks during his career. And yet, he was …

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Mark Pack

Can you tell the heroes from the villains in the sub-prime mortgage disaster?

By Mark Pack | Thu 21st June 2012 - 10:25 am

Michael Lewis’s highly readable account of the collapse of the US sub-prime mortgage market and the worldwide financial crisis it triggered focuses on a small number of characters. People with iconoclastic views determined not to be constrained by the old conventional rules. People who created new financial investments. People who put money into places their investors did not really understand on a good day and did not even know what had been done with their money on a bad day. People who made huge profits …

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Mark Pack

The New Depression: Richard Duncan’s prognosis of our economic ills and the answer to them

By Mark Pack | Mon 18th June 2012 - 1:54 pm

A slight change from the usual in my day job at MHP Communications has come courtesy of our client Richard Duncan and his new book, The New Depression, which is primarily about the US but with lessons that are very applicable to the UK.

In a nutshell, his case is half-Austrian. Or indeed half-Keynesian. That is because whilst Duncan’s diagnosis of the current economic ills is very much in the Austrian school of economics, with its emphasis on the role of credit, his prescription for fixing the economy is large-scale borrowing to fund infrastructure work, all of which sounds rather Keynesian.

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Mark Pack

Vince Cable: Free Radical – what the memoirs say about the man

By Mark Pack | Mon 7th May 2012 - 10:25 am

A little belatedly, I’ve got round to reading Vince Cable’s memoirs (or rather, listening to the audio book version – what better accompaniment to a delivery round?).

Vince Cable’s memoirs do much to explain both the praise and the criticism he has received. At one point he writes how “I am often asked why I am not party leader…”. Conceit or modesty? You can read that comment either way and it is easy to see why he produces such different views.

Views differ too over quite where …

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Mark Pack

Gurkha: The true story of a campaign for justice by Peter Carroll

By Mark Pack | Fri 30th March 2012 - 4:05 pm

The Gurkha Justice campaign, seeking to give those who had served in the British army the right to settle in Britain afterwards, is a classic and heartwarming story of how a small number of people can bring justice and joy to many.

For many years Gurkhas and others had raised the injustice of ex-soldiers being told ‘thank you for your bravery, now go and live elsewhere’. It was, however, only when Peter Carroll got involved that an effective campaign really started to take shape and then took off after a chance remark from a passing member of the public tipped him off to Joanna Lumley’s potential backing.

As Peter Carroll puts it in this account of the campaign:

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Mark Pack

Paddy Ashdown: A Fortunate Life

By Mark Pack | Thu 15th March 2012 - 4:50 pm

It is a tribute to Paddy Ashdown’s varied and fascinating careers that even hardened politicos reading his autobiography, A Fortunate Life, do not express regret at how relatively briefly his British political career features in it.

Around two-thirds of the book document his times as a Royal Marine, in the Special Boat Service, then as a spy and finally, after time as an MP and leader of the Liberal Democrats, international peacemaker in the former Yugoslavia. Even if his time as leader of the Liberal Democrats had ended quickly in ignominious failure, Ashdown would have multiple impressive legacies to outweigh it. That in fact his time as leader saw remarkable success in rescuing the party from death’s door makes all but the most hardened reader end up feeling their life is just rather tame, straight-forward and under-performing compared to Ashdown’s.

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Mark Pack

Plan C: The Social Liberal Forum’s economic prognosis

By Mark Pack | Tue 13th March 2012 - 10:50 am

There has been a very welcome recent revival of policy thinking in the Liberal Democrats, despite the large cuts to the party’s official policy research staff. This has included a new think tank (Liberal Insight) and good work by Richard Kemp and the local government sector in encouraging imaginative plans for making use of the new legal powers going to local government.

Added to this is the Social Liberal Forum’s further foray into economic policy-making, following up on some of their successful events with their first policy pamphlet. Prateek Buch’s “Plan C – social liberal approaches to a fair, …

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Lord William Wallace

Peace, Reform and Liberation: how does the new party history measure up?

By Lord William Wallace | Thu 12th January 2012 - 10:25 am

Late last year a new history of the Liberal Democrats and its predecessor parties was published. In this post William Wallace reviews it, whilst you can watch Paddy Ashdown, Julian Glover and Shirley Williams talk at the book launch here.

I had not expected to enjoy this book as much as I did, or to learn as much from it. It covers the political history of 332 years in 372 pages, unavoidably gliding past major episodes with passing glances. Eleven chapters by different authors suggested a degree of incoherence. Yet there are some clear underlying themes, and a number of aspects …

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Mark Pack

Flying Free: Nigel Farage’s take on his own life

By Mark Pack | Thu 5th January 2012 - 10:25 am

Events and the political calendar are likely to keep UKIP as one of the most prominent ‘other’ political parties in the UK over the next few years, making this newly revised and expanded autobiography of its most high-profile and flamboyant personality, Nigel Farage, timely not only for the party’s own fans but for anyone else interested in British politics.

It is a well written, lively book, full of the sort of pugnacious language that has helped give Farage his high popularity. It is also rather kinder to some of his opponents that you might expect if you had only come across Farage through his headline grabbing strings of insults aimed at others, though when it comes to the EU and its main functionaries he doesn’t hold back. He even has some kinds words to say for the man who threatened to kill him – and rightly so given the person’s mental health had fallen apart.

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Mark Pack

What our readers have been buying this year…

By Mark Pack | Fri 30th December 2011 - 11:45 am

Lib Dem Voice has an affinity deal with Amazon, which means if you purchase goods from Amazon via our link, Lib Dem Voice earns a small commission. We don’t get to know about people’s individual orders, but Amazon does report overall sales and these show that the five best-sellers to our readers in 2011 were:

1. The British General Election of 2010 (reviewed here)
2. 22 Days in May by David Laws (reviewed here)
3. Peace, Reform and Liberation: A history of liberal politics in Britain 1679-2011 (watch the book launch with Paddy Ashdown and Shirley Williams here)
4. Don’t Take No For …

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Mark Pack

Brown at 10: the authoritative account – which lays into Ed Balls

By Mark Pack | Wed 30th November 2011 - 3:54 pm

When it first came out Brown at 10 by Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge was extremely well received for its authoritative detail and the revised paperback edition maintains that standard well. With Seldon being one of the founders of the modern school of contemporary history, it is no surprise that the book follows the thorough, heavily documented approach contemporary historians strive for – with over 1 million words of interviews recorded for posterity (even if many are, for the next 30 years, withheld from public view) and extensive access to private diaries.

The huge depth of research is accompanied by …

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Mark Pack

Was there a Clegg coup? Review of The Clegg Coup – Britain’s First Coalition Government Since Lloyd George by Jasper Gerard

By Mark Pack | Wed 23rd November 2011 - 9:54 am

Many book titles reveal little about what their book contains, either providing but a banal name for its contents or a clever, clever name which obscures rather than reveals. However, The Clegg Coup – Britain’s First Coalition Government Since Lloyd George by Jasper Gerard has a title which is revealing in two aspects. First, the way general accuracy in the book is marred by detailed slips – for whilst the general point of the title is true, with the May 2010 coalition being the UK’s first peacetime coalition in Westminster since before 1939, the title does not use the …

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Iain Sharpe

Book review: Peace, Reform and Liberation – “the first port of call for anyone wishing to learn more about Liberal and Liberal Democrat history”

By Iain Sharpe | Wed 16th November 2011 - 10:25 am

There has long been a need for a single volume history of the Liberal and Liberal Democrat parties covering the entire period from its roots in the constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century to the present day.

While Liberal history has received plenty of attention from historians, previous studies of the party have been limited to a specific eras or themes. In many ways of course the party has several histories. This includes the origins of the Liberal tradition in the Whigs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the heyday of Liberal government in the middle of the nineteenth century, the party’s decline and near extinction between the 1920s and 1950s, its recovery in the second half of the twentieth century, and now the challenges of governing in coalition with the party’s historic enemies, the Conservatives.

So it is welcome that the Liberal Democrat History Group has sought to fill a gap with Peace, Reform and Liberation.

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Mark Pack

Dishonourable Insults by Greg Knight

By Mark Pack | Fri 4th November 2011 - 7:46 am

Over the years, Conservative MP Greg Knight has made a mini-cottage industry out of collections of political insults, wit and invective, of which the new Dishonourable Insults is the fifth.

Spot checking the content of this volume against one of his previous works – Parliamentary Sauce – you find that there is a fair amount of reused content, including whole passages which reappear with varying degrees of editing. Generally the 19th and early 20th century figures have had their range of insults edited down, losing as a result one of my favourite Disraeli insults, directed at a backbench MP: “He is not …

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Ed Maxfield

Opinion: Reassessing New Labour

By Ed Maxfield | Mon 31st October 2011 - 3:54 pm

It is worth buying Reassessing New Labour just to read James Purnell’s short preface. New Labour’s would-be philosopher king pretty much disappeared from view after Labour chose the wrong Miliband as leader. Purnell’s piece highlights perfectly the challenge Labour faces in coming to terms with its 2010 election defeat. It is brilliantly lucid in assessing why Labour lost. It is extremely limited in its analysis of how to recover. In particular it completely ignores the 500lb gorilla in the corner – the economy. I’ll come back to this in a moment.

Diamond and Kenny’s book brings together a range of contributions …

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Mark Pack

Don’t Take No For an Answer: Lewis Baston and Ken Ritchie on the AV referendum

By Mark Pack | Wed 26th October 2011 - 10:35 am

The May 2011 electoral reform referendum is not a happy memory for Britain’s electoral reformers, which makes this book from two long-standing electoral reform campaigners surprisingly positive. As the title indicates, their view is that the overwhelming No vote does not signal the death of electoral reform in the UK.

In part the optimism comes from the gory details it gives of the appalling mistakes and mismanagement in the referendum Yes campaign. This was not a superbly organised push for electoral reform that got defeated; the weakness of the campaign gives some hope for a future if, as the authors express the hope, the book helps people learn from the mistakes made.

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Jasper Gerard

Jasper Gerard writes… The truth about David Cameron’s relations with Liam Fox

By Jasper Gerard | Fri 21st October 2011 - 9:25 am

Rarely can a ministerial resignation be less mourned than Liam Fox’s. An intriguing aspect of his fall is explained in my book The Clegg Coup. Senior Lib Dems and Tories told me repeatedly how Cameron and Fox loathed each other. Indeed, Cameron would often ring our Nick Harvey rather than his Fox to the extent that Harvey became known as “Cameron’s man at the MoD”.

“Fox sees himself as the prince across the water,” I was told. “He thinks Cameron never faced a proper challenge for the leadership because he was edged out in the first round by David Davis, whom he considers flaky. Liam is not going to blow his shot too early and it’s a good way off, but I do think he wants to challenge Cameron for the leadership.”

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Jasper Gerard

Jasper Gerard writes… The Clegg Coup – and the serialisation horror

By Jasper Gerard | Wed 19th October 2011 - 9:25 am

To those who fear the future marching over the horizon, this must feel suspiciously like enemy occupation. Liberal Democrats, with their new and sinister continental ways, have seized power. If conservative opinion believed it had the measure of Labour, it can’t quite get to grips with Britain’s newest rulers. For not only are Liberal Democrats in office for the first time, they have given us an apparently foreign form of government, a coalition.

Traditionalists have to trawl back more than a century for the homely comfort of precise precedent. Such has been the opposition to peacetime partnership, where two united parties …

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Mark Pack

After the Coalition: A Conservative agenda for Britain

By Mark Pack | Tue 11th October 2011 - 10:25 am

Collections of policy essays from new or junior MPs rarely have much of an impact or shelf-life in British politics, but however fallible their predictions for the future they can be illuminating about the current state of the authors’ party and its broad ideological direction.

So it is with After the Coalition which is very different in tone and hope for the future from last year’s Which Way’s Up? by Nick Boles. The contrast is there in the sub-titles for the two books. Boles had “The future for coalition Britain” whilst the five authors behind this volume have gone for …

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Mark Pack

The Bigger Book of Boris: lots of jokes, not much politics

By Mark Pack | Thu 6th October 2011 - 10:50 am

One of the questions that ambitious politicians often struggle to answer safely is, “Do you want to be leader of your party / Prime Minister?” Answer ‘yes’ in some form and journalists will line up to write stories about party splits, pending leadership challenges and the like. Answer ‘no’ and many will not believe you – whilst also quietly filing away the answer to quote back at the politician at an embarrassing later date.

The Bigger Book of Boris (an expanded version of the earlier Little Book of Boris) shows Boris Johnson’s political skill with humour in his answer to this question. …

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Mark Pack

Campaigning In Your Community: new book out

By Mark Pack | Wed 24th August 2011 - 11:54 am

Phew, book number 18 that I’ve been involved in as author or editor is now out. It’s written by myself and Shaun Roberts, called “Campaigning In Your Community”. Think of it as as guide to getting going with community politics, starting from your own doorstep.

A free copy is being sent to every ALDC (Association of Liberal Democrat Councillors) member or you can buy copies from the ALDC online shop (sales only open to party members).

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Mark Pack

Nick Clegg: The Biography published today – is it worth reading?

By Mark Pack | Sat 20th August 2011 - 11:47 am

The pre-publication newspaper serialisation of Chris Bower’s biography of Nick Clegg used extracts which covered the Deputy Prime Minister’s early life. When you read the full book the reason for this is amply clear. It has much interesting to say about Nick Clegg’s multi-national family and their close brushes with the tragedies of the early twentieth century. As it gets on to Clegg’s political career, however, it increasingly has little to say that will not already be familiar to close followers of political news from other accounts.

In a few cases it even has less to say than has already …

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Mark Pack

Book review: Andrew Murrison on the military covenant

By Mark Pack | Sun 14th August 2011 - 9:09 am

Taking its title from Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem, this book by Conservative MP Andrew Murrison is rather a mixed bag. There is much that is interesting and thoughtful in his study of how wider society views and treats the military in Britain, but that is rather let down by a meandering structure which results in some topics being returned to frequently, the flow within many chapters being unclear and indeed the actual origins of the military covenant being largely unmentioned. We get a little detail of who first wrote the words and when, but almost nothing about what triggered the …

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Mark Pack

Explaining Cameron’s Coalition: politics as seen through the eyes of MORI polls

By Mark Pack | Wed 3rd August 2011 - 10:24 am

Explaining Cameron’s Coalition is the latest in the series of general election analysis by MORI’s Robert Worcester and Roger Mortimore, this time joined by two other authors. The book is therefore very much the tale of the 2005-2010 Parliament and subsequent general election seen through the eyes of MORI’s opinion polling, with an often pungent analysis which certainly fits Robert Worcester’s happiness to point out when he got predictions right and others got them wrong.

Though there is a smattering of references to polling results from other firms, the great strength of the MORI data is that many of the …

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Mark Pack

Tony Benn: A Biography

By Mark Pack | Fri 29th July 2011 - 10:25 am

Weighing in at 550 pages, including a long and detailed index, Jad Adams’s biography of Tony Benn is just the sort of traditional and detailed work of biography that befits a politician who was an MP for half a century and who became a government minister, won promotion to the Cabinet and served his last day as a minister all before most of the current generation of ministers were even in Parliament.

Tony Benn’s career was not only lengthy, it was high profile and – at least before the twilight years as ‘the nation’s favourite retired politician’ – deeply controversial. …

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Mark Pack

Who is Ed Miliband?

By Mark Pack | Thu 21st July 2011 - 12:26 pm

Authors of the best accounts of the New Labour years delved deeply into the rival Brownite and Blairite versions of events before coming to their own conclusions. Those who did not frequently ended up with embarrassingly lopsided and inaccurate accounts.

Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre, the authors of Ed: The Milibands and the making of a Labour leader, have avoided making the next generation’s version of the same mistake by talking to both sides of the Miliband family, even returning more than once to the conundrum of when Ed told David he was going to run against him for leader. …

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Mark Pack

The Cameron-Clegg Government: or the perils of publishing a book early in the Parliament

By Mark Pack | Mon 30th May 2011 - 3:54 pm

Simon Lee and Matt Beech’s new book The Cameron-Clegg Government: Coalition Politics in an Age of Austerity has, at first glance, a lot going for it. A line-up of significant academic names, a well-known and reputable publisher (Palgrave Macmillan) a subject matter that is rarely out of the news and (unlike for books about the 2010 general election) a field relatively clear of rival publications.

A second glance suggests one of its problems: although nominally about both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, there are five contributors who are listed as having published books purely about the Conservative Party but …

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Mark Pack

Who joins the BNP and who votes BNP?

By Mark Pack | Thu 26th May 2011 - 7:25 am

Matthew Goodwin’s new book, New British Fascism: Rise of the British National Party, expands on one of his previous works on political extremism to look in-depth at just the BNP.

New British Fascism: Rise of the British National Party has at its heart an extensive set of interviews with BNP members. His conclusion is a nuanced one – that the BNP has carved out a strong base in a narrow niche, meaning both that it is not likely to disappear any time soon nor is it likely to break through to major levels of support.

That base is made …

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Mark Pack

Political Communication in Britain: the latest 2010 election book

By Mark Pack | Thu 19th May 2011 - 8:44 am

Political Communication in Britain, edited by Dominic Wring, Roger Mortimore and Simon Atkinson, joins a long list of books already published on the 2010 general election. As with others it also faces the tough task of finding a niche between the burgeoning coverage of politics in the media, especially online, and the revitalised Nuffield general election series.

In its favour, Political Communication in Britain brings together a strong cast of journalists and politicians who were active participants in the election, with six of the nineteen chapters coming from insiders such as Sky’s Adam Boulton, the Labour Party’s Greg …

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Mark Pack

In Defence of Politicians: Peter Riddell’s new book

By Mark Pack | Wed 11th May 2011 - 1:24 pm

For decades Peter Riddell has been one of the best British political commentators, regularly providing his readers with insight rather than, as is the way with second-rate commentators, simply leaving the reader little more enlightened at the end of a piece that knowing that, yes, that commentator’s own political views are the same as they were last time.

So his book, In Defence of Politicians Inspite of Themselves, has many years of experience and analysis behind it. It originated in a lecture he gave on the same theme in February 2010 and reads like an extended version of the lecture. …

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