Michael White's choice
Does Claire Tomalin's new biography Dickens (Viking, £30) count as a political book? Dickens was very political (he hated politicians), so I think it does. And Robert Harris's (he's not keen on most of them either) latest psychological thriller, The Fear Index (Hutchinson, £18.99), tells of the run-up to the great bank crash of 2008. Less racy is Alistair Darling's Back From the Brink: 1,000 Days at Number 11 (Atlantic, £19.99), a characteristically solid account of the crash – the banking system's and his own with Gordon Brown – written by a politician whose rare lack of ego was perfectly suited to the chancellorship he inherited just before the derivatives hit the fan in 2007.
Some will find Julian Assange – The Unauthorised Biography (Canongate, £20), ghosted by Andrew O'Hagan, a compelling read, not least English-speaking Swedes. The Importance of Being Awkward (Birlinn, £25) is the extraordinary memoirs of – who else? – the Old Etonian serial rebel, Tam Dalyell. String-pulling, name-dropping, opinionated in every line, an innocence bolstered by immense self-confidence, this is a maddening book, but also a riveting read, detailing Dalyell's many campaigns, often lonely, often lasting for decades, sometimes triumphantly vindicated years later. Scottish devolution, which he vigorously opposed: right or wrong? Kosovo, Iraq, the Falklands, Afghanistan, Libya, he opposed those interventions too. An admirable career.
Ken Livingstone would probably approve of Dalyell, though his own gargantuan autobiography, You Can't Say That (Faber, £25), is "not for the faint-hearted," so Seumas Milne advised in his Guardian review. But the Peter Pan of City Hall does have a 30-year record in public life to defend and attack, which is more than can be said for the subjects of key political biographies in 2011. Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre's Ed: The Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader (Biteback, £17.99) is an admiring quickie; Sonia Purnell's Just Boris: The Irresistible Rise of a Political Celebrity (Aurum, £20) perhaps conveys more than it intends in the title. An anti-European, libertarian tub-thumper who privately prefers the company of urbane metropolitan moderates, he may find he has to work harder to stay in office as recession deepens.
Purnell's volume is also up against Andrew Gimson's elegant Boris: The Rise of Boris Johnson, soon to be updated and reissued, a melancholy but hilarious book about a boisterous career that evokes a character from Evelyn Waugh). Nick Clegg: The Biography by Chris Bowers (Biteback, £17.99) is unlikely to provide as much fun to loyal Lib Dem activists who buy it for each other's Christmas stockings. Opinion polls suggest we might have to wait a while for the 10th reprinting.
The saintly Peter Riddell published an unfashionable book this year, In Defence of Politicians (In Spite of Themselves) (Biteback, £9.99), which is fair-minded and well-informed. Most politicians are honest and hard-working in a trade which, far from being triumphalist, has lost its nerve in the face of fearful events that cannot be controlled and what Riddell calls "the rise of the ranters" in Fleet Street and the internet. "Thought-provoking" is as honest as I dare be without damaging sales.
What does that leave us with to end on an upbeat note? The Archbishop of Canterbury, an attractively unworldly intellectual in so many ways, is telling friends this Christmas that they might enjoy John Butler's The Red Dean of Canterbury (Scala, £16.95), which may not strike younger readers as a very political book either. Older ones will vividly recall how Hewlett Johnson was a turbulent cleric, as tormented by the tabloids as Mayor Livingstone. Why so? For decades he was a champion of Stalin and remained one long after wartime solidarity and the repression in eastern Europe had tempered wider enthusiasm. Johnson even defended the 1956 invasion of Hungary, a turning point for many. Definitely a niche market in north London for this one.
Admirers of Hewlett may regard Chris Mullin with some suspicion: a former Tribune editor and campaigning journalist (the Birmingham Six, etc), he became an MP in a less wayward version of the Dalyell model, briefly and unhappily (mostly) a minister under Tony Blair, whom he liked despite being able to see through him. In one volume of Mullin's diaries, the third of which was published this year (A Walk-On Part, Profile, £20), Blair is still referred to by the author as "The Man". The Man sacked him as Africa minister in 2005 but Mullin is never unhappy on the backbenches for long. Like Riddell he sees politics as an honourable trade (in spite of himself). Perceptive, witty, humane, indignant and self-lacerating by turn, Mullin has the qualities of all enduring diarists, though he lacks the frustrated ambition which often makes a Pepys or an Alan Clark so unintentionally funny. The play of the books has just arrived in London. See it if you can. Or read the book.
Rafael Behr's choice
At some point at the end of the last century it became normal to talk about politicians having brands. Previously they had reputations. Is there a difference? Perhaps, since a brand is tested in the marketplace, with success measured purely in terms of who is buying today. Reputation can be enhanced or destroyed by the longer judgment of history.
The distinction is a central theme, although never explicitly stated, in The Unfinished Revolution (Abacus £16.99) by the late Philip Gould. (The author died in November.) It is an updated edition of an account first published in 1998 of the creation of New Labour by the man whose forensic study of opinion polls was instrumental in diagnosing what was wrong with the "old" version. No book published this year contains more insight into modern politics. It is an antidote to the lazy critique of Tony Blair's project as a cynical exercise in stealing Conservative clothing. Gould makes a persuasive case that New Labour was a sincere vocation to reunite a party with voters so as better to represent them in government. Gould might have deployed the techniques of modern marketing, but he looked beyond the problems of Labour's brand to the underlying political mistake – the failure actually to listen to what the public was saying – that risked destroying its reputation as a party that cared.
So where did it all go wrong? Plenty of answers to that question are contained in the third volume of The Alastair Campbell Diaries (Hutchinson £25), which are as compelling and as demoralising as might be expected from a former tabloid polemicist's account of life as Blair's chief spin doctor. Two essential flaws show up in the way New Labour wielded power. First, there was a tendency to mistake communication of a message for the implementation of a policy. Second, the chancellor was determined to supplant the prime minister and the prime minister lacked the means or the will to stop him. Blair comes across as strangely diffident in the face of Gordon Brown's machinations and tantrums. He seems to have felt some guilt when faced with Brown's claim to have been cheated of a prime ministerial birthright, even though everyone else in No 10 thought it delusional.
The consoling hope was that the flaws in Brown's temperament were caused by frustration that would dissipate once he got into No 10. They didn't, as is clear from Back from the Brink (Atlantic £19.99), Alistair Darling's memoirs of serving as Brown's chancellor. The imperative of dealing with the worst financial crisis in living memory did not stop the prime minister treating his colleague and former friend with histrionic aggression. He ran, Darling says, a "brutal regime", reinforced by a gang of advisers who failed to confront him over his destructive behaviour.
Somewhere in that gang lurked one Edward Miliband. But he could never be mistaken for a thug. It simply isn't his style, as documented in Ed (Biteback £17.99), Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre's biography of Miliband. Inevitably, when the book was published, newspapers filleted it for stories about poisoned relations between the man who became Labour leader and David, the older brother he beat to the job. The book narrates that competition in detail, while avoiding wild psychoanalytic speculation. Awkwardly for Miliband, however, the perception of fratricide stuck in many voters' minds before he had a chance to shape a public image on his own terms.
If Miliband ever worries about his brand, he can find comfort in the fact it could not be worse than Nick Clegg's. In last year's televised election debates the Liberal Democrat leader achieved the closest thing politicians get to stardom without dancing for charity. He was cheered as a fresh face representing a new kind of politics. He then went into coalition with the Conservatives, reneged on a signed campaign pledge, and became the emblem of everything people hated about the usual kind of politics. Is the damage irreversible? Can a solid reputation be built from a flimsy brand? This is the vital question for the Lib Dems but it is handled timidly in Chris Bowers's biography, titled simply Nick Clegg (Biteback £17.99). It is a mostly banal precis of the Lib Dem leader's story so far.
Not so Just Boris (Aurum £20), Sonia Purnell's colourful biography of the mayor of London (more of a political celebrity than Clegg will ever be). Purnell decodes Johnson's complex personality, hoping to explain how a man so famously disorganised and prone to sexual and political misdemeanour has scaled the heights of public life. The answer is a cocktail of charisma, intelligence and pathological self-belief. It is a potent formula but one that comes across as ultimately toxic and likely to prevent the man from fulfilling his ambition, always suspected but never admitted, of one day becoming prime minister.
A similar combination of traits (albeit manifest in very different politics) comes across in the autobiography of Boris's arch rival, Ken Livingstone, You Can't Say That (Faber £25). Ken is the only other British politician whose first name is also a brand. He is more generous to himself than any other author would be, and even when trying to be modest, the self-regard still pokes through. The book is most engaging as social history, describing an austere childhood in 1950s London. There is a turning point at the end of the 60s described, with unintentional comedy, as the moment his life was "consumed with an exhilarating round of committee meetings". By the end of the 70s, his worldview feels limited to the internal processes of the Labour party as it prepares for a long journey away from the electorate.
The party's final lap in the wilderness and return to power provide the backdrop for A Walk-On Part (Profile £25), Chris Mullin's diaries as an MP, covering the period 1994-99. Mullin's previously published journals of the thankless life of a junior minister (covering 2000-2007) have justly been celebrated as masterpieces of the genre. This prequel has the same vital ingredients: candour, brevity and wit. Here is a man who would surely laugh at the idea of politicians aspiring to have anything so facile as a brand – a healthy cynicism that probably limited his career but guarantees his reputation as a diarist.
Rafael Behr is chief political commentator for the New Statesman
• Which books about politics would you give?
