'Dangerous Hero' by Tom Bower

When Corbyn was Labour leader, I found it very difficult to get any real idea of how good or bad he was doing, because the reporting of him was so blatantly polarised. He was vilified in the mainstream press, and hailed as a messianic figure on social media. The mainstream reporting was so brazenly hyperbolic that it was easy to disregard it all as a smear campaign; when anyone criticised Corbyn, they could be dismissed as part of the Establishment campaign against him. Two hyperpolarised mythologies developed around the Labour leader: Corbyn the Messiah, who would champion the downtrodden and lead Britain to a golden age; Corbyn the Destroyer, who hated Britain and sympathised with terrorists.

Tom Bower's book is all of the Corbyn the Destroyer mythology condensed into one handy volume, published in 2019 (it was also serialised in the Daily Mail). It is not a good book, sometimes it is comically bad, and it is riddled with errors and inaccuracies.

Sources are not provided for most of the information - 'for legal reasons... unusually the book has no references'. When a source is named, such as the notoriously untruthful George Galloway, it becomes clear that Bower has largely been in contact with people who disliked Corbyn or had vendettas against him: he has no interest in getting a proper understanding of Corbyn as an actual person, only in presenting him as an incompetent Marxist cartoon villain. 

The sources of quotations from books, magazines, and newspapers are also frequently not given: we are just meant to trust that the magazine or newspaper did say it, but are not given the date or issue number for us to find the quote ourselves. We also have to take it on trust that Bower has not deliberately omitted positive comments from his various sources. The few times that a source does say something positive about Corbyn, Bower immediately tries to defuse it:

'"People thought he was a nice bloke," conceded Allcock. "He made them feel comfortable. He even charmed his adversaries." In his constituency dealings at least, Corbyn had perfected a genial mask, despite not yet proving himself as an effective MP.'

Bower pretends to understand Corbyn's inner thoughts and motivations, which are invariably sinister and malicious: he acts not out of concern for the unfortunate, but out of hatred for the upper and middle classes. For example, before he was an MP, councillor Corbyn pushed to for houses to be built on some parkland; if we are to believe Bower, Corbyn's main goal here was to annoy the middle classes who would lose their park, not to help people without homes.

'Annoying Haringey's middle classes game him particular delight. Faced with a huge housing problem after the arrival of thousands of Cypriot refugees in London, Corbyn proposed building homes on green parkland. Local residents were outraged. The rich, he scoffed, clearly disliked living alongside immigrants - but they would have no choice.'

Racist dog whistles are common throughout. The reader is meant to be suspicious of Corbyn's anti-imperialist beliefs and championing of refugees and immigrants; we are meant to see him as anti-White, anti-British, a self-hating white British man who sides with foreigners against his own people: 'He would black up if he could,' one Labour MP said of Corbyn, according to George Galloway.

This characterisation is appalling, and I think it tells you a lot about the author. Indeed, throughout Bower comes across as an intensely repulsive man; this is not helped by the two author photos, in which his body language and facial expression make him look like an absolute prick. 

Furthermore, in the introduction and author bio, Bower says he used to be a Marxist himself back at university, and was known as 'Tommy the Red', and yet he seems completely incapable of understanding Corbyn & co's ideology and motivations. Leftist descriptors such as 'Marxist' are used almost as synonyms for 'evil' or 'villainous'. Corbyn is variously described as 'ideologically inconsistent', 'obsessed with ideological purity', 'Marxist', 'Trotsykist', 'committed to Stalinism', and 'anarchist'. These words have incompatible meanings which you would expect a supposed former leftist to understand; Bower's 'ex-Marxist' backstory reminded me of the unconvincing 'ex-atheist' backstories encountered in works of Christian apologetics. If he genuinely was Tommy the Red, my assumption is that he was motivated by teenage rebellion and a temporary dislike of middle class Britain, and he is projecting those remembered feelings onto Corbyn & co.

The book's subtitle is 'Corbyn's Ruthless Plot for Power'. As a result, Corbyn's lack of both ruthlessness and ambition for power throughout are hilarious recurring themes. Bower repeatedly tells us that Corbyn is ruthless without backing this up; often he clunkily adds implied ruthlessness when it manifestly isn't there.

'Lenin would have expected him to act ruthlessly, but... <proceeds to describe a lack of ruthlessness>'

It is clear throughout that Corbyn is not power-hungry. He was quite happy as a backbench MP focused on his constituency and protesting global injustices; he had never aspired for ministerial positions or put in the work to develop policies. In 2012, he was considering retiring to Wiltshire to focus on beekeeping and growing vegetables. On page 311 out of 348, describing the 2017 election campaign, Bower says:

'The campaign had transformed Corbyn himself. The veteran protester understood that politics was no longer just a series of battles within the Labour Party, but actually about winning real power. His new ambition was to become prime minister.'

It is on page 311 out of 348 of a book supposedly about 'Corbyn's Ruthless Plot for Power' that Corbyn is first described as wanting power.

The book ends with what is meant to be a mic-drop by Bower, but it is such a failure of a mic drop that it perfectly illustrates how lazy and perfidious the book is. Bower does not believe that 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' is Corbyn's favourite poem, as he has claimed in interviews.

'His enthusiasm for it was dubious, not least because Wilde himself was no believer in socialism.'

Bower then closes the book with a part of the poem which ends with,

'For none can tell to what red Hell

His sightless soul may stray.'

The implication is that Wilde was somehow warning of a socialist hellscape like the USSR, but the poem is about someone being executed by hanging at Reading Gaol, the British prison, and the 'red Hell' refers to - you know, well - the afterlife hell to which 'his sightless soul may stray', not to socialism.

That's not the worst of it. After reading this I had to look around for a bit thinking I was going mad or had fallen into a parallel universe. Hadn't Wilde wrote an essay advocating socialism? The Soul of Man Under Socialism? Wasn't this essay a socialist classic?

'Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member of the community.'

Either Bower didn't bother to check Wilde's views on socialism (even just by Googling 'Wilde socialism'), or he doesn't care, because it doesn't matter if the book is truthful or accurate: its only purpose is to damage Corbyn's reputation.

There are of course grains of truth in the book, as there was in other Corbyn coverage, (I think it is quite clear that Corbyn's administration would have been disappointing, that the bond market would have savaged him, that he was out of his depth as leader, that he had some weird views, and that there was a serious anti-Semitism crisis*) but they are so thoroughly buried in falsehood and hyperbole that it becomes easy to dismiss it all as smears and nonsense. Those hoping for an accurate insight into Corbyn and his leadership would best look elsewhere.

*When Corbyn was leader, I had absorbed, from friends and social media, the narrative that the anti-Semitism crisis was largely an Establishment smear against Labour and Corbyn. I wasn't following politics or the story very assiduously, and I wasn't on social media that often. However, by the time Rebecca Long-Bailey was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet, I was on social media more often, and on the day of her sacking I saw a huge explosion of anti-Semitic comments and posts from leftwing sources. This was a moment of Great Disillusionment for me, the scales fell from my eyes.

'Terrorism and Communism' by Leon Trotsky

One leftwing narrative about the Russian Revolution is that in its early years the Soviet State was doing good work creating a better society, but then Stalin came along and ruined it. Back in 2017, I went to a book event where the author/speaker made this argument - I bought his book, but have not read it yet (nor have I read the other books on the revolution which I purchased that year). The author described himself as a Trotskyist.

Trotsky was one of the organisers of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, and then became leader of the Red Army. After the Revolution, Russia quit WW1 and Civil War broke out, chiefly between the Communist Reds and the Anti-Revolutionary Whites, with various smaller groups also being involved (many leftwing groups did not like the Bolsheviks). Trotsky was ousted during Stalin's rise, and spent the rest of his life in exile, before being assassinated by a Soviet agent in Mexico in 1940. 

In Animal Farm, the character Snowball is largely based on Trotsky, a sympathetic portrayal that follows the narrative that the revolution started well but was ruined by Stalin, represented by Napoleon. One of Trotsky's later books, which seems to have popularised this narrative, is The Revolution Betrayed (1937).

Terrorism and Communism (1920) is Trotsky's defence of political violence - it is also one of the very few of his books that is still in print by a major publisher, and comes with a long introduction by Slavoj Žižek. I posted in a leftist Facebook group that I was reading it, and a few people commented, saying it was 'one of Trotsky's best' and 'an absolute banger'.

This context should hopefully explain why I went it into expecting, despite the controversial title and subject matter, to feel some positivity towards it. Instead, I bounced off it so hard I almost ended up a Thatcherite; indeed, I was left thinking I would much rather have the Tories in power than Trotskyists.

At times, I wanted to hit my head against a wall, and once I imagined myself looking to camera and saying, "Wow, this is garbage."

In hindsight, it should not have been so surprising that I hated it. On the Political Compass, Trotsky is Authoritarian Left. My instincts place me in Libertarian Left: my radical sympathies lie more with anarchism rather than Bolshevism. In leftwing groups, a frequent topic of discussion is uniting the fractious Left against the more united Right, but many argue that there are irreconcilable differences between Authoritarian and Libertarian leftists, which make such an alliance impossible to maintain: anarchists and communists were enemies in both the Russian and Spanish Civil Wars.

(The Political Compass is a simplification, and has probably had negative impacts on political discourse, but it's a fun simplification and has led to some good memes.)

Trotsky is good at describing flaws in parliamentary democracy: the political and legal equality of the wealthy capitalist and the poor labourer, both having one vote in elections, is mystical nonsense. It does not take account of economic realities and the ways the political and legal system is biased in favour of the wealthy, who can use their wealth to influence politics and get away with criminality ('Punishable by a fine' translates to 'Legal for rich people'). Thus, with political power concentrated in the hands of wealthy, and the workers only having insignificant or indeed illusory power, you might describe liberal democracy as a 'dictatorship of the bourgeoisie' - therefore, the solution is to trash this false democracy and put in place a 'dictatorship of the proletariat', where political power is held by workers, represented by the Communist Party, the only political party. 

It is not the job of the communists - the class-conscious and politically advanced vanguard of the working class - to represent majority opinion, but to create it, by elevating the understanding of the rest of the population and proving how good communism is. Eventually, the rest of the working class, and the re-educated remnants of the bourgeoisie, will understand that the communists were right all along.

The criticisms of parliamentary democracy are strong - and you can find echoes of them across all sorts of media right up to the present day. I was specifically reminded of Isabel Hardman's Why We Get The Wrong Politicians (2018) and Martin Williams' Parliament Ltd (2016), among many other works. His explanation of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' made me understand this doctrine better, though I think the flaws in it are quite evident.

Some of Trotsky's arguments in defence of political violence are quite standard, and could be used by adherents of any political position: sometimes, when your political opponents are uncompromising, inconvincible, and repressive, violence is the only way to topple them. When you are a new and fragile regime, surrounded by enemies within and without, violence is inevitably necessary to maintain control and defend the revolution. 

Trotsky uses various examples of political violence throughout history to make his point; today, we might use the example of the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars. Of course their violence was necessary to overthrow the Galactic Empire! Unfortunately the sequel trilogy did not explore the rebels' difficulties in establishing the New Republic: this is covered in books I have no intention to read.

So we can agree that violence is sometimes necessary. If we were to then agree that liberal democracy is a dictatorship of one class over the rest, and that the interests of the ruling class are directly antagonistic and irreconcilable to those below it, then we can see how easy it is to justify a violent insurrection and subsequent reign of terror.

'As long as class society, founded on the most deep-rooted antagonisms, continues to exist, repression remains a necessary means of breaking the will of the opposing side... The question as to who is to rule the country, i.e., of the life or death of the bourgeoisie, will be decided on either side, not by references to the paragraphs of the constitution, but by the employment of all forms of violence... [There is] in history no other way of breaking the class will of the enemy except the systematic and energetic use of violence.'

It's a recurring theme in history, and popular media, that revolutions end up recreating the old order with new faces in charge. Some descriptions of Tsarist Russia from the 1800s can be mistaken for descriptions of Soviet Russia, for example this one by the Marquis de Custine, who visited in 1838:

'It is a country in which the government says what it pleases, because it alone has the right to speak. In Russia fear replaces, that is paralyses, thought... Nor in this country is historical truth any better respected than the sanctity of oaths... even the dead are exposed to the fantasies of him who rules the living.'

Trotsky defends the Soviets against charges that they are using exactly the same tactics as tsarism by pointing out that the Soviets are doing it to the bad guys, the capitalists, the landlords, the bourgeoisie - not the good guys, the proletariat. 

'Do you grasp this... distinction? Yes? For us Communists it is quite sufficient.' 

'Who aims at the end cannot reject the means.'

The end goal is, of course, a socialist utopia. The Soviet state is described as the transition towards true socialism, when the state 'will have melted away entirely into a producing and consuming commune'. This is where Trotsky sounds most like a religious fanatic awaiting his preferred apocalypse. Actually, 'awaiting' is perhaps the wrong word, since in his mind the Marxist apocalypse is already here: he is living through it. As the Christian Heaven on Earth is preceded by Armageddon, the final battle between Light and Dark, so too is True Socialism preceded by the Revolutionary Epoch, the final battle between Proletariat and Bourgeoisie:

'The road to socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the state. And you and I are just passing through that period. Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the state, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the most ruthless form of state, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction... civilised humanity has entered a revolutionary epoch; all the capitalist countries are speeding towards colossal disturbances and an open class war; and the task of the revolutionary representatives of the proletariat is to prepare for that inevitable and approaching war the necessary spiritual armoury and buttress of organisation.'

During the transitional stage, forced labour is necessary. Trotsky uses a few arguments to justify this. In wartime, it is fairly standard for states to conscript soldiers; it is necessary for the defence of the realm. The communists are extending this principle to the militarisation of labour: as conscripting soldiers in wartime is necessary and acceptable, why not the rest of the labour force? Furthermore, labour under capitalism was wage slavery, made compulsory by the forces of economic necessity: 'freedom of labour' was a lie. 

By contrast, forced labour under communism is honest about the compulsion, and besides, at least the workers were now working for the Communist Party, who have their interests in mind, not some heartless capitalist; and at least the compulsion is only temporary during this transitional stage. Once we reach True Socialism 'there will be no compulsion... under socialism we shall be moved by the feeling of duty, the habit of working, the attractiveness of labour, etc, etc... under socialism there will not exist the apparatus of compulsion itself, namely, the state.'

'As all must eat, all are obliged to work. Compulsory labour service is sketched into our constitution and our labour code.'

'The worker does not merely bargain with the Soviet state: no, he is subordinated to the Soviet state, under its orders in every direction - for it is his state.' 

Trotsky defends the Soviets against the charge that they are slave state no better than the Egyptian regime who used slaves to build the pyramids by pointing out that the Egyptian slaves were working in the Pharaoh's interests, while the Soviet workers are working in the interests of the workers, as represented by the Communist Party.

Parts of this book make Trotsky sound like someone who has never organised any industry or enterprise before, trying to explain why practices he and his mates had previously being railing against have persisted after the revolution. These are the funniest parts of the book, because he's defending practices associated with capitalism while desperately trying to rebrand them.

For example, he describes the importance of 'rivalry' in boosting economic production. He wants us to believe that this 'rivalry' is different to capitalist competition. Under socialism, 'rivalry will acquire an ever less selfish and purely idealist character. It will express itself in striving to perform the greatest possible service for one's village, region, town, or the whole of society, and to receive in return renown, gratitude, sympathy, or just internal satisfaction from the consciousness of work well done. But in the difficult period of transition... rivalry must inevitably be to a greater or lesser degree bound up with a striving to guarantee for oneself one's own requirements.' He also explains why some people need to be paid more than others, if they've 'done more for the general interest' than the lazy, careless, or disorganised.

Elsewhere, he defends 'One-Man Management' of factories against critics who argue the factories should be under the control of the workers themselves. Trotsky argues that (a) the factories are controlled by representatives of the Communist Party, who represent the working class, therefore the factories are actually under worker control; and (b) one-man management is more efficient, because it means a single person is ultimately responsible and accountable for the factory; and besides, if a worker is interested in management, perhaps one day when they're a bit more experienced they can earn a promotion and become a manager themselves!

'The foremost, intelligent, determined administrator naturally strives to take the factory into his hands as a whole, and to show both to himself and to others that he can carry out his work.' Gee, I wonder what it would be like if that administrator owned the factory.

To understand how Trotsky got to these views, we do need to understand him in historical context. This book was written during the Russian Civil War, after the great conflagration of the First World War. His views were shaped by the traumas of war and political repression under the Tsar. After the revolution, the Bolshevik regime was fighting off enemies on multiple fronts while trying to figure out how to govern effectively and bring about socialism. It is also worth reflecting on how terrible the conditions of the working classes were globally at that time, and also specifically in Russia under the Tsar. Add in Marx's and others' many criticisms of capitalism, many of which still hold up.

Communism, like Christianity 2000 years ago, offered people radical hope for a better world following an imminent apocalypse. The Communist Manifesto's famous finale, 'The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.' is not so effective these days in the developed world: most people can point to many things they could lose other than metaphorical chains; we live lives of relative comfort, both in the global picture and certainly compared to the working classes of a century ago.

However, I can certainly understand communism's appeal when you're living in a slum, when you have long working hours in terrible conditions and a dead-end job with no hope of advancement or change. If you're already living under wage slavery, why not communist slavery? At least that's only temporary while you wait for Heaven on Earth.

I did not find this book 'an absolute banger'; I found it relentlessly tedious, unpleasant, and nonsensical. I can certainly understand wanting and hoping for a better system than what we have now, but the answer - if this book, supposedly 'one of Trotsky's best', is anything to go by - is not to be found in Trotskyism.

'Politics: Between the Extremes' by Nick Clegg

I went into this with a mixture of feelings about Nick Clegg. I voted for the first time in 2010, and it was for the Liberal Democrats. I was intensely politically ignorant, not understanding or knowing much about our political system or the different parties, and barely following the news, but I had absorbed some of the 'Cleggmania' in the air. Later, I absorbed the feelings of betrayal that surrounded the Coalition and the tuition fees debacle, and all the negative feelings towards Clegg among students (I was a student at this time). 

Later still, I developed a mental image of Clegg as someone naïve and completely out of his depth in government and media management - this mental image of Clegg was a sympathetic one, and was born out of a belief that the intense hatred directed at him following the tuition fees debacle was probably excessive. I also have a strong impulse to want to believe the best in people, that people make mistakes but are generally trying to do good - this makes me want to avoid villainous caricatures and try to understand people as flawed humans where possible, although I appreciate some people are just dickheads.

I came out of Clegg's book with a far more negative view of him; the book constantly frustrated me. The leftist meme 'Liberalism: The Highest Stage of Cringe' came to mind a lot. Clegg comes across as overconfident, smug, and dismissive towards people who don't share his views. He characterises non-liberals as over-emotional, irrational, illogical, unrealistic, extreme, in contrast to the Liberal Democrats' rational, moderate, logical, realistic politics. He derides 'populism' on the left and right, but also admits to having used populist strategies in 2010, which led to Cleggmania. However, he thinks it was fine for him to do this because he's a reasonable, rational, logical Lib Dem, in contrast to today's over-emotional and irrational populists, and besides, it wasn't his fault if the voters had irrational and unrealistic beliefs which they projected onto him, was it?

'I felt at the time that I was becoming a screen onto which people were projecting their hopes and aspirations, some of which were not realistic. A gap opened up between who I was and what my supporters imagined me to be.'

The words 'rational', 'reasonable', 'realistic', 'logical' and similar cropped up so frequently when describing the Lib Dem position that it became a running joke in my head, and I was tempted to go through the book highlighting them all. Clegg comes across as one of those people who thinks everyone else is irrational and illogical but him; he fails to understand how his values and biases alter his perception of what is logical, realistic, rational. In another life, Clegg might have been a Shapiro-esque character telling voters that facts don't care about their feelings - hell, there's even a subcategory of racists who call themselves 'race realists', and argue that their racism is grounded in logic, reason, realism, rationality. Simply describing your political views as logical, realistic, rational, and reasonable, does not mean they will seem that way to someone else.

The idea of the Lib Dems as the party of reasonable, rational, logical policies - in contrast to over-emotional populists and the two major parties - goes completely out of the window when we get to his explanation for the tuition fees debacle. It turns out that many of the Lib Dem higher ups had serious misgivings about the policy of reducing or scrapping tuition fees - Clegg thought it was unrealistic; Vince Cable thought it was 'fiscally incredible' and 'financially unsustainable'. However, they were unable to convince the (presumably over-emotional, irrational, illogical) wider party, so it was put in the manifesto and was part of their campaigning. 

Students were a demographic where the Lib Dems were especially popular; Lib Dem MPs signed a pledge promising to vote against tuition fee increases, and Clegg made online videos advocating a policy he thought was absurd, irrational, illogical, unrealistic. Almost like he was a populist anti-establishment politician using unrealistic policies to win votes.

According to other accounts of the coalition, Clegg was warned (by George Osbourne no less) that supporting increasing fees would be political suicide for the Lib Dems, and he was given the option to abstain on the vote. In this book, Clegg does not mention that he was given this advice or option; he simply insists that raising the fees was the rational, realistic, logical thing to do. 

You can certainly make the argument, as Clegg does, that raising both the fees and the earning threshold did improve universities, increase student numbers, and was effectively a graduate tax for higher earners - but the optics of Clegg's tuition fees decision was terrible: Nick Clegg, the Betrayer, leader of the spineless, treacherous Lib Dems, who would dispense with their principles for a taste of power. One of Clegg's 2010 party political broadcasts had him saying NO MORE BROKEN PROMISES - the Lib Dems are still thought of by many as the Party of Broken Promises.

The Conservatives took most of the credit for the Lib Dems policies that were implemented and were popular - such as raising the Income Tax Personal Allowance, which was featured heavily in the Conservative 2015 campaign. I had a personal encounter with a Tory using it as an argument in their favour. 

Clegg was utterly naive about media management, publicity, propaganda - he assumed truthful information about the work he was doing would flow naturally out of government and inform people about everything the Lib Dems were up to. Instead, hardly anyone knew what they were doing, which made them look pointless. I could not believe that Clegg - by this time he was in his 40s, had been an MP for five years and leader of his party for three - could be that monstrously ignorant both of the importance of the media in creating political narratives and of the biases of the British media.

Clegg's explanation of his reasons for going into Coalition are convincing; there was no good outcome, and arguably coalition may have been the best outcome of a bad bunch, especially if the Lib Dems managed to implement some of their policies. Although, I can't help but wonder which of Clegg's choices, if made differently, led to a far better alternative present - which of his decisions damned us to the darkest timeline? That'd be a fun episode of Marvel's 'What If...?' 

They made holding a referendum on electoral reform a core point of the Coalition Agreement, because such reforms could benefit the party in future. However, he did not think too much about the optics of the anti-establishment party appearing so enthusiastic about teaming up with the party most associated with the establishment - to him, the coalition was the reasonable, rational, logical thing to do.

'But what seemed logical to me appeared deeply unsettling to many people who had voted for the Liberal Democrats...' 

A chapter is devoted to the difficulties faced by the Lib Dems trying to implement electoral and House of Lords reform. Clegg imagines himself continuing the reformist Liberal tradition, from Earl Grey's Great Reform Act to Lloyd George's post-WW1 expansion of the electorate; however, he fails to reflect on the circumstances that surrounded those earlier reforms. Those reforms were implemented due to huge public pressure, protest, and fear of outright revolution. 

The initial blocking of Earl Grey's Reform Act by the House of Lords led to riots across the country (Nottingham Castle was burnt down in the Reform Riots - it was owned by a Tory who was very vocal in his opposition to reform); the suffragists and suffragettes had long campaigns, and in the aftermath of both WW1 and the Russian Revolution, political reform was a way to calm an angry populace who had come home from war only to live in slums and have no say over their government. The MPs advocating those earlier reforms could get the doubters on side by arguing that the alternative might be full blown revolution.

During the electoral reform referendum, both the Conservatives and Labour supported the No campaign, and the by-then deeply unpopular Lib Dems were the face of Yes. There was no wider public pressure for reform. The No campaign used Clegg's unpopularity in their campaign, and 'the dream of electoral reform was crushed.'

Clegg's failure to reflect on the circumstances around earlier reforms makes his obvious conclusion sound ignorant:

'The fact that the British political system appears to be so immune to change - and so in hock to the vested interest of the two larger parties - will only strengthen the hand of populists who argue that real change requires more extreme action. The more the vested interests in Westminster set their face against overdue reform, the more ferocious the reaction to mainstream politics will become.'

No shit, Nick, but having the threat of such extreme action happening is probably the only way to get enough MPs to pay attention. It was what led to the earlier reforms, after all - not a mild-mannered and unpopular politician politely asking his colleagues to do the logical, reasonable, rational thing, but a warning that if the people's demands weren't met, the alternative to reform would be much worse. I'd prefer this not to be the case, but history, and Clegg's own tale, argue otherwise.

Other accounts of the coalition describe the Tories being shocked at the naivety of the Lib Dems: how willing they were to go into coalition, how much they were willing to compromise to get a few of their policies implemented, and how little they seemed to think about the electoral costs of coalition. After the signing of the Coalition Agreement, William Hague went home and said to his wife, "Well, we have formed a government, but we might well have destroyed the Liberal Party."

A chapter is devoted to the history of coalition governments in various countries; Clegg lists example after example of coalition governments ending disastrously for the minor party. Sometimes the minor party rebounds in popularity, gets into coalition again, and then once again it is punished at the next election. The few examples he lists of minor parties being rewarded electorally for going into coalition are when both parties are on the left. This is exactly the stuff that the Tories are elsewhere described as having been shocked that the Lib Dems didn't know about when agreeing to coalition - since their main goal in government was to reform the voting system in such a way that would make coalitions more likely, it was bizarre that they didn't know much about how coalitioning parties faired elsewhere.

Another chapter is devoted to the relationship of the Lib Dems with the two main parties. This involves Clegg reflecting on how his politics was shaped by the his early years as an MP, and how this contrasted with other, older Lib Dem MPs, who hated going into coalition with the Tories. The Lib Dems of Clegg's age built up relationships with the Tories during their time opposing New Labour together, in defence of civil liberties against War On Terror legislation - this was 'one of the early bonds that kept the later coalition together'. Older Lib Dems - who were there for the SDP breaking away from Labour, and then merging with the Liberal Party to form the Liberal Democrats - retain a fondness for Labour, hoping for an anti-Conservative alliance with them, and perhaps eventual coalescence if the differences can be overcome. This was an interesting exploration of how political views and biases are shaped by differing life experiences.

In 2015, the main selling point of the Lib Dems was that they would prevent either of the two major parties from being too extreme in their opposite directions. In 2010, their campaign had argued that Labour and the Conservatives were too similar to each other and it was time for change; in 5 years, the Lib Dems had gone from the party demanding change to the party that was scared of the other parties changing things too much, a support-destroying strategy if ever there was one. Clegg's political career is over, and the Lib Dems have, as yet, failed to bounce back. Indeed, 'Lib Dem Fightback' became a meme, and I don't even know off the top of my head who their leader is these days (I just Googled it: Ed Davey, apparently).

Last year, I read books by Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, and Alistair Darling, and I came out of them with a grudging respect for, and a greater appreciation of, them as flawed individuals, limited in their knowledge and experiences, doing their best based on the values they believed in - despite my disagreements with, and reservations about, each of them. Nick Clegg's book, however, pleasantly written and largely enjoyable as it is, has surprised me by making me feel far more negatively towards him than I did before.

The next political book I'll write about here will be by a very different figure to Clegg - not someone 'Between the Extremes', but someone very firmly ON an extreme. Tune in next time!