Knives on tour: Felixstowe Bookfest, Sat. July 1

This event - in the Orwell Hotel, aptly - is now booking. Come along, it'll be lively.

The Knives: A Guardian Book of the Year 2016

The Knives: a New Statesman Book of the Year

Church-Going & Book-Talking in Dulwich

Look right and there's Alan Johnson talking to me about his latest memoir The Long and Winding Road, at All Saints Church in Dulwich on the night of Thursday September 29. Churches are grand places to hold literary talks: the acoustics are tremendous, of course, but there's a tenor as well as a timbre that the location loans to you. Larkin put it most finely on why even the non-believer feels some instinctual piety upon crossing the threshold:

'Since someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious / And gravitating with it to this ground / Which he once heard was proper to grow wise in.'

Johnson's new book is as engaging and well observed as the first two, the difference being that it finds him in the tangle of thorns that is professional politics rather than the worlds of childhood and workaday employment that were the grist of This Boy and then Please Mr Postman. But obviously he and I had plenty to talk about; and on the side he could not have been kinder on the subject of how he was getting on with The Knives.

Alan Johnson, MP and memoirist, in conversation with me in Dulwich on September 29 2016

Rated by certain wise heads as the Prime Minister we ought to have had circa 2009, Alan Johnson has won an alternative and arguably more gratifying distinction for himself as a bestselling and prize-winning memoirist. Following This Boy and Please, Mr Postman, he is poised to publish a third volume of life studies entitled The Long and Winding Road, this one carrying his story into the echelons of trade union leadership, election as a Labour MP and a number of stints as government minister. Johnson will be discussing his life and works with me in a special event organised by Dulwich Books at 7pm on September 29, at All Saints Church on Lovelace Road, West Dulwich.

There's a good piece in today's Financial Times by Robert Shrimley, in which Johnson is compared with the former Sunderland South MP Chris Mullin, who has also turned his hand to writing with distinction and who, like Johnson, manages the feat of being a politician who is a recognisable human being. Shrimsley credits Johnson with 'the common touch; an easy manner that belies his intelligence and his hard upbringing.' He goes on to argue:

'At a time when the public is increasingly alienated from the archetypal politician, especially those who seem to have spent their entire life in political activity, the need for able, moderate leaders with a demonstrable human touch has never been more pressing.'

I do take issue with the grounds of this so-called public 'alienation'; and I don't think politicians need to beg for their characters if they didn't happen to come from a tough and unpromising background. It's a fact, moreover, that people with the most obvious human qualities still might struggle with those aspects of political leadership that call for something of the devil's work. And it's quite clear that Alan Johnson, for his own perfectly good reasons, never really wanted to take a crack at the job of leading Labour. Still, however forlornly, I rather wish that he had - just because the road not taken might have been one of the several that could have steered us clear of our present wreckage.

Bookhugger column: On Jonathan Powell's 'New Machiavelli'

My second Bookhugger column of the month is now posted here, and with that out of the way I hope to read no more studies of British government between 1997-2007, at least not before my dotage... I should say I wrote and filed said column before the resignation of Alan Johnson and the appointment of Ed Balls, so... well, you can imagine my mood.

The other Lost Leader...

With Labour seemingly mired in one of its periodic phases of being led by windbags, hypocrites and small-scale connivers (it’s been that way for several years now...) it’s hard to think about ‘moving forward’, not with so much rebarbative recent history still to be digested… David Laws’ recent sour remarks about Ed Miliband (amid his hasty reminiscence of the ConDem shotgun wedding) should be set in context of Laws’ obvious Toryism and attendant hatred for Labourism. But the Mail's serialisation of Brown at 10 by Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge made for more disconcerting reading. Let’s set aside the risible spectacle of the Mail arrogating to itself the right to determine, Socialist Worker -style, exactly who is a traitor to the cause of Labour. The rest of us just need to read between the lines and marvel anew at how such a sanctimonious and scarily self-obsessed pair as Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman wound up at the very pinnacle of the Labour Party, prior to blessing Ed Miliband as their rightful inheritor.

John Rentoul’s revival of 'AJ4PM' is tongue-in-cheek, surely, for the moment has passed, just as so many other promising Labour ‘moments’ have crashed into the rocks over recent years. I haven’t been wowed by Johnson’s despatch box performances as shadow chancellor. But, rare in a politician, he remains a recognisible human being, one with just the right mix of frankness and canniness, and unlike his Leader he's not about to bang on about the defeatingly populist notion that people ought forever to hand back more than half their income once they've made their way to £150K.

Johnson's recent tribute to his Leader has a nicely minimal feel: 'Everyone’s got their views about how we get back into government and there’s a variety of views in the Shadow Cabinet… … we have to discuss those differences of opinion like mature people which is really a mindset that I think Ed has brought into the party that is I think commendable...'

No, I don't wish to re-run redundant quarrels so even I balked a little at Rentoul's observations in his print column today: "There were disloyal whispers at Westminster last week. Anonymous speculation about Brownites organising for Yvette Cooper to succeed [EdMili]. Sarcasm about when he was going to start in his new job. Grumbles about his breaking his paternity leave on Friday to provide a soundbite for TV news on Lord Young's resignation – a Tory bad news story that needed no help from him – instead of to surprise us with his plans, say, to be tough on immigration..."

But, y'know, if the cap fits... Or as the bracingly rude Daily Mash satirises it, 'Despite assurances from David Miliband that there would no repeat of the Blair-Brown 'soap opera', his supporters said that would be f**king right...'

Vote Labour, all ye penitent sinners...

Gordon Brown’s determination to behave as though he were a character invented by Dostoyevsky – rather than forged at the foot of a stern Scots kirk, the personal back-story Brown prefers – is the big news again. Yesterday’s carnival of reaction had me thinking back to the moment 20-odd years ago when I discovered Dostoyevsky as my ‘favourite writer’, a status he’s more or less retained. One of the scholars whose writings were helpful to my discovery of his work was Professor John Jones of Oxford, who also introduced me to Kafka’s defence of the typical Dostoyevsky hero as a man not utterly deranged but merely ‘incidentally mad’ – in the same manner as the rest of us. Jones was certainly with Kafka on this point, arguing that we all mutter to ourselves when we think we’re alone, cursing under our breath, ‘F**k me!’ or ‘I’ve got him!’ or suchlike. ‘We all do it!’, Jones insisted.
Well, ‘I’ve got him!’ would certainly sum up the current, gleeful view of the Tory commentariat in respect of Gordon Brown, following his inadvertently 'on-mic' dismissal of the woman he met in Rochdale. It’s schadenfreude, of course, but, even if we do indeed ‘all do it’, it’s fair to say that only three of us are currently running for the office of Prime Minister. We are back in ‘psychologically flawed’ land again.
This PM is an unlucky general, for sure. But we do make our own luck in life to a large extent, and Gordon Brown has been stumbling through a veritable thicket of bad karma for years now. His apology was pulpit language – ‘a penitent sinner’, indeed – but the forced grin on his face as he pronounced himself ‘mortified’ was indeed worthy of one of Dostoevsky’s internally divided anti-heroes. Or, to summon another literary spirit – ‘I went on sinning every hour, and all the while most strenuously warring against sin...’ Thus Robert Wringhim, he of James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), the classic text of Gothic Scottish Calvinism.
All I would say to Brown’s happy detractors is: beware that karmic redress, for it is certainly coming down the pipe at us all. We all say hard words when we think no-one’s listening - sometimes even for the amusement of other ears, if we're sure the company is entirely congenial. Had I the misfortune (say, on election night…) to step into some room populated wholly by the Tory commentariat – say, the likes of Benedict Brogan, Fraser Nelson, the guy who calls himself Guido Fawkes, etc, etc – I do suspect the air in the room could probably be condensed down into a draught fit to turn the noble Dr Jekyll into the gloating Mr Hyde.
In any event, this blog is voting Labour on May 6. It will be a ‘lost vote’ in my case, as Hornsey and Wood Green – captured by the Lib Dems in 2005 in a wave of protest against the ousting of Saddam – is not looking remotely likely to change its mind this time. (This likelihood, though, has not converted me to electoral reform…)
I can’t say I’m hungry for 5 more years of Gordon Brown in Number 10: I have for some time wanted Alan Johnson or David Miliband in that job. I do, however - and for my sins - prefer Mr Brown to the other contenders. More pointedly, in the short-term, I want Alastair Darling to stay Chancellor, Miliband to stay Foreign Secretary, Johnson to stay at the Home Office. Anyone who wants Osborne, Hague and Grayling in those jobs has my very best wishes for a swift recovery. (I couldn’t actually tell you whom the Lib Dems would put up for those positions, but I don’t feel a great loss.)

Alan Johnson: With God on his side...

To be the Home Secretary of Her Majesty’s Government must rank among the loneliest jobs in the world, morally speaking. Just consider the number of hot-button public issues on which you are the nation’s chief and guiding voice – crime, the police, immigration, class-A drugs, the terrorist threat, inter alia. There's a distinct danger you could end up catching the blame for just about everything that's wrong with the nation at any given time.

Whether incumbents are actually fit to hold this post - or merely there because the government of which they are a part could appoint no-one better - is a different matter entirely. For instance, I remember Margaret Thatcher’s last H.S., David Waddington, as a would-be hang-'em-and-flog-'em martinet of such cardboard-cut-out ridiculousness that I always expected him to blow over in a stiff breeze. (Moreover, I don’t think that professional Yorkshireman David Blunkett ever deserved to be taken a fraction as seriously in the job as he took himself; and as for Jacqui Smith, one can, presumably, hold fire now inasmuch as she herself now seems to agree that she was a ‘disgrace.’)
It is tough, though, for an honest man in that job to act on his convictions and carry out policy in the spirit of the public good, without getting pelted by dead dogs. I recall the honourable Charles Clarke going on the BBC to debate his Tory shadow in front of a studio audience prior to the 2005 General Election. For all that no-one was warming to the Tory, Clarke was nonetheless sneered at roundly throughout, and never more than when he defended the need for extreme vigilance, expenditure, and emergency measures to counter the threat of domestic terrorism. Paxman (for he, of course, was our MC for the night) turned loftily to the audience and asked if any of them were feeling remotely threatened in that respect? Not one hand went up, the silence clearly signifying a mass disapproval of Clarke's police-state apologia. Three months later, after the London bombings of 07/07/2005, I’m sure the same mob would have said that Clarke should have bloody well gone to any lengths to avert the atrocity, even without the public’s backing or sympathy (and, anyway, it was all Nu-Labour/B-liar’s fault anyhow, etc etc.)
So, to Alan Johnson. Every once in a while you see a politician who strikes you as a recognisable human being – and an honest, sane, principled, witty and astute one at that. Johnson is the most affable contender in this line whom I can remember, and I wish his career every continuing success. I have watched his tenure at the Home Office meet with various choruses of disapproval, none of them meaningful (and some as ludicrous as the Daily Mail’s campaign to prevent the extradition of the computer hacker Gary MacKinnon, who, I’m afraid, made his bed once he started leaving abusive messages behind him on the Pentagon's systems.)

Currently Johnson is getting it in the neck over his decision to sack a chap called Professor Nutt, chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) after Nutt went to great lengths to ensure the public knew that it was his view – if not the Government’s – that alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous than cannabis, that taking Ecstasy is no more dangerous than horse-riding, and that cannabis has upgraded to a class B drug for ‘political reasons.’
Here is the nub of the Home Secretary’s existential dilemma. How can drug policy be made subject to scientific finding when the use and abuse of drugs is a social issue, and the effects of same can’t be reproduced in any laboratory? Or as Alan Johnson phrased it in a letter to the Guardian last week:
“As for [Nutt’s] comments about horse riding being more dangerous than Ecstasy, which you quote with such reverence, it is of course a political rather than a scientific point. There are not many kids in my constituency in danger of falling off a horse – there are thousands at risk of being sucked into a world of hopeless despair through drug addiction.”
Yes, alcohol is our national drug and is indulged beyond belief in a culture where the (clear) benefits of cannabis as a form of pain relief for the seriously ill are still (pointlessly) subjected to debate. I would probably prefer it if, rather than this current useless quarrel, we could all have a serious one, about the legalisation of all drugs. But since the public and our politics won’t permit that, let’s deal with the supposedly deterrent measures at hand, i.e. how the Government frames its level of concern over the possible risks of certain drugs, a level at which the keen drug-user must then frame his or her response (i.e., caveat emptor.)

This blog is an unshamed fan of the occasional derangement of the senses, and always has been; and any man who - like this man - appreciates beer, wine and whiskey should therefore try not to make an enemy of the man who finds his contentment of an evening in cannabis. But these fairly like-minded enthusiasms also carry undeniable costs, personal and social, at differential levels; and so all enthusiasts must be ready to circle the wagons around certain agreed norms. A poster calling himself onestepback phrases it well at the Sky News link cited above: "Alcohol and tobacco are of course bad for us, and knowing this we should discourage the use of other substances of like kind. We can do the liberal thing and erode society by allowing everything, or we can apply common sense and limit things that are bad for us to a manageable proportion."

This, de facto, is the position where we find Alan Johnson, and it seems to me the right place for Her Majesty's Home Secretary to be. I hope he has longer to run in this job, and that a yet better job lies in wait for him.