There are at least two sides to every story, and in the case of the recent history of Labour in government there would appear to be two-dozen and counting – a veritable wilderness of mirrors in which to search for the authentic glimmer of truth. This is on account of the sheer weight of ‘NuLab’ memoirs, diaries and reckonings already published or still lying in wait; and I have done my best with the time I have on earth by trying not to get too involved, choosing my reads slowly and studiously.

To speak only of the man whom David Cameron and George Osborne are rumoured privately to call ‘The Master’ – Tony Blair’s A Journey has for five weeks sat plonked by my desk with an envelope wedged into it around p.50. It’s not that I’m uninterested, you understand, far from it – rather, that it was all getting far too interesting. I’m utterly fascinated by the strong County Durham influence on Blair’s version of Labourism (as anyone who’s waded through my novel Crusaders will know to their cost), and so as he began to speak of what his doughty Sedgefield constituents taught him in his early days as an MP (in summary, ‘the ‘working class’ were not as homogeneous a group as many politicians assumed’) I really had to set the book down before I felt another novel coming on.

I’ve had a far less complicated, indeed simply pleasurable experience with The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World by Blair’s ex-chief of staff  Jonathan Powell, who has tried to relate the maxims of the legendary Florentine civil servant to the proceedings he witnessed in Downing Street and elsewhere from 1997-2007. There’s no danger of too stodgy a history lesson given Powell’s clean, brisk, wry prose. However he does want his readers to understand that government is a business that calls for more than good intentions, indeed for a rare combination of skills, and that some folk (such as ‘The Master’) have got ‘em, and others, quite lamentably, have not.

Bismarck famously described politics as ‘the art of the possible.’ I wouldn’t have wanted to read Powell’s thoughts back in 1997, or even 2001, when my notions of what government is able or ought to consider ‘possible’ were as vast as the Sahara. Since then, I suspect the nature of working life and the experience of institutions has persuaded me (as it persuades many others) to reluctantly accept that government is as much a test of man-management, how to run a meeting and how to fire-fight against external blow-ins as it is a daily challenge to heed one’s better angels. Powell is extremely good on such pragmatics and logistics, all the tediously vital things that have to be marshalled in order to do a shred of good through politics – and he is unfussily frank about where and why the Blair government failed the test, while retaining an equally cool-headed pride in its achievements.

Of course, Blair was ousted finally not by the British electorate or even his own Party, however restive they got, but by his in-all-but-name deputy, his dour black shadow, Gordon Brown of Kirkcaldy. Powell’s evaluations of Brown (who refused to speak to him for 11 years after a perceived slight, despite Powell’s centrality at Number 10) seemed to me at first rather subtly indiscreet… but gradually they move centre-stage and amount to a devastating critique. As Blair’s biographer John Rentoul has argued in his assessment of Powell’s and other books, ‘Brown is lucky that the full extent of his disloyalty has emerged only gradually and only after he ceased to be prime minister.’

Still, it’s not quite right to say that Brown is the villain of The New Machiavelli, since its author is careful to paint a more shaded portrait, to wit:

‘Gordon had real strengths as a politician. He was highly intelligent, interested in policy detail, a brilliant political tactician and driven by an enormous force of will. These talents were in the end, however, tragically overwhelmed by his flaws. The bullying and the control freakery I have described were not really the problem – they are a common enough part of politics. It was the lack of courage that was the real issue…’

Yes, we are back (cf. Alastair Campbell) in ‘psychologically flawed’ territory again. Powell reports a fascinating analysis of Brown that was imparted to him over several glasses of wine by the late Robin Cook, who will have known pretty well of what he spoke. As Powell paraphrases it:

“Gordon’s parents were very strict, and Gordon simply could not admit to doing anything wrong or making mistakes. That meant he had to eschew any responsibility. If he was accused of anything, he would simply deny it was him and point the finger at someone else. It made it difficult for him to make decisions…”

Brown has always liked to imply that his character was essentially forged like girders at the foot of a stern Scots kirk and that, things being so, he could never knowingly do or say a bad thing. This preposterous trait, this bad hangover of the Calvinist conscience that forever ‘modestly’ parades its own sense of self-worth, nevertheless made Brown the darling of Labour conference and an acceptable proxy for the Party’s supposed ‘soul’ in the eyes of those who care for such things.  And yet more than once, observing Brown’s career from afar, it occurred to me he was like a character invented by Dostoyevsky (the man who gets called ‘The Master’ around my house.) For instance, in April 2010 when Brown addressed TV cameras after his cringe-worthy apology to the Rochdale grandmother he took for a bigot, he described himself in pulpit language – ‘a penitent sinner’, indeed! – and yet the grin on his face as he announced that he was ‘mortified’ was wholly worthy of an internally divided Dostoyevskian anti-hero.

Then again, in the spirit of dualism that seems as native to Scotland as mist, we might better refer to a Scottish literary source:

“I had come under many vows, most solemnly taken, every one of which I had broken; and I saw with the intensity of juvenile grief that there was no hope for me. I went on sinning every hour, and all the while most strenuously warring against sin, and repenting of every one transgression as soon after the commission of it as I got leisure to think…”

Thus Robert Wringhim, protagonist of James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), the classic text of Gothic Scottish Calvinism. Young Wringhim is of the devil’s party though he doesn’t know it until too late. Yet both his mother and the local minister, whom he considers a father, think him a ‘wonderful boy’. But old John Barnet, the minister’s man, has got the measure of Wringhim: ‘I’m feared he turn out to be a conceited gowk…’ And what better epithet could there be for an individual who fancies power in all its titles and trappings, yet has not a notion – good or ill – of what to do once he’s snatched it?

As far as Jonathan Powell remembers, the sum of Brown’s thrusting new ideas agenda, as late as 2005, was to ‘introduce more tax credits’ and to ‘remove soft drinks machines from schools.’ A meagre haul, even by the modest standards of ‘the art of the possible’, and you have to say that Brown reaped the rancid karma he had sown. Indeed – by any estimation, but in that of New Labour’s memoirists in particular – it could and arguably should have been worse for him. And yet Brown and Brownism endures, the stubborn insect that survives the blast, and you may still read of its fortunes here.

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