Michael White has a fun post up on which political memoirs really were worth the advances that their publishers paid for them. Which raises the question of which politician’s autobiography would you pay to read?
Top of my list would be Peter Mandelson. He is the most psychologically interesting of the New Labour founding fathers. He’s also the one who is probably most aware of how close the project came to failing. Remember that, unlike Blair and Brown, he was shut out after Neil Kinnock’s 1992 defeat.
Put alongside that, Northern Ireland where he appears to have seen the flaws in Blair’s approach more clearly than anyone else on the Labour side and his time in Brussels and you’ve got a pretty interesting mix. For an added bonus, you’ve got his accounts of his rows with Brown: all of which should make for a pretty good read.
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