A Journey through Labour's Lost England Sebastian PayneLondon: Macmillan, 2021, £21.00 Whether Boris Johnson gets bored with No 10 or nervy Conservative Party funders push him out of the door, the author of Broken Heartlands finds little to comfort those hoping to see Sir Keir Starmer in Downing Street any time soon. While the Labour leader may want to flush his efforts to block Brexit down the...

Perhaps this important book may one day be read by those alerted to it by seeing reviews in the mainstream press. But given its subject matter – former Derby North Labour MP Chris Williamson and ‘Labour anti-semitism’ – I’m not holding my breath that many will appear. Both man and subject are now dismissed as old hat by many inside and outside the party to which he devoted his political life. But that doesn’t mean that the events taking place in the years of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership – well described by Lee Garratt – aren’t worth our scrutiny: where the mainstream is silent is where our attention is often most needed.

When in 2016 I assembled some material on the September 11 attacks in the United States, the 15th anniversary generated very little mainstream interest. Would the investigation of 9/11 go the way of the President John F Kennedy assassination in 1963: anniversary recycling of old stories with its surviving researchers inhabiting the Grassy Knoll cast as ‘conspiracy theorists’?

If Sir Keir Starmer ever chooses to confront Boris Johnson at Prime Minister’s Questions he could do worse than draw upon these diary entries of the Tory leader’s former deputy at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Sir
Alan Duncan’s near-daily record has presented the ‘forensic’ Leader of the Opposition with an arsenal of ammunition that Rumpole of the Bailey could only dream of after his third bottle at Pomeroys.

IN the political turmoil following Labour’s Hartlepool rout, many in the party fear for its future despite its relative success in Wales and several parts of England. The forthcoming by-election in Batley and Spen following Tracy Brabin’s election as West Yorkshire Mayor has added to the concern: are we in for another Conservative drubbing?

There are journalists – and then there are journalists. There’s Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, who while London Mayor called his £250,000 Daily Telegraph second-job contract ‘chicken feed’. ((https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/jul/14/boris-johnson-telegraph-chicken-feed)) And then there’s the digging work Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnot have put in for the The Sunday Times over the past Covid year and which they have brought together in this important book.

When back in 2015 newly elected Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was first hit by critical abuse, Benjamin Netanyahu had just warned President Barack Obama of the power of the friends of Israel in Washington DC. Hundreds of members of the US Congress afforded Israel’s prime minister repeated standing ovations for assertively undermining their president’s Iran nuclear deal.

Anyone reading and hearing about Labour’s annual conference in Brighton might have thought it riven by yet more acrimonious controversy over anti-semitism. From The Guardian to the Daily Express and the broadcast journalists in between that was the big story for those critical of the party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the September launch of this book on Labour Party strife during its annual conference in Brighton should itself become embroiled in controversy. Hoping to hear and question the academic authors when they appeared in the city’s Waterstones store, I purchased my ticket, only to learn the following day that the bookstore’s London HQ had ordered the event’s cancellation.

In the swirl of controversy over ‘Labour’s anti-Semitism problem’ that has followed Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader in 2015, the complex subject of Israel and Palestine has rarely featured in popular discussion. These three books offer those who wish to move beyond this largely faux confection more understanding of an issue that has dogged international affairs since the foundation of Israel in 1948.

Did you know that the body of Iraq weapons inspector Dr David Kelly, who died mysteriously in 2003 after being named by 10 Downing Street for criticising its war-promoting dossier, had been exhumed and his remains cremated?

‘The 9/11 terrorists were not just lucky once: they were lucky over and over again.’
9/11 widow Mindy Kleinberg addressing the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States 31 March 2003.

When I asked for this book in one of London’s radical bookshops, I was told they didn’t stock the work of a Tory columnist. The kindly assistant didn’t know that Peter Oborne had written a fine book on South-African-born cricketer Basil D’Oliveira, confirming with solid evidence the long-held suspicions of anti-apartheid campaigners about the malign roles of business and politicians in Pretoria and London and the conspiracy hatched with the Lord’s cricket establishment.