Robert Colls
Equality Knocks
Left for Dead? The Strange Death and Rebirth of the Labour Party
By Lewis Goodall
William Collins 341pp £20
A Useable Past, Volume 2: A New Life – The Religion of Socialism in Britain 1883–1896. Alternatives to State Socialism
By Stephen Yeo
Edward Everett Root 329pp £75
Lewis Goodall is a political correspondent for Sky News and before that worked for Newsnight. He had a ‘working-class childhood’ (his father worked for Rover at Longbridge), which, he says, keeps him grounded. He knows, for instance, that saying nothing doesn’t mean having nothing to say, and that people know more about their lives than what they read on the side of a bus.
He went to St John’s College, Oxford, which made him sharp enough to get ahead and grateful enough to defend the attempts of Tony Blair (same college) to increase social mobility. His book is a hundred pages too long but you fly through it, sometimes still turning the pages while popping to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. He’s unbearably young and unbearably obsessed with what passes for politics in a world of two-minute lives and quick-fire pieces to camera. With the sort of metropolitan media friends who organised a party expecting a Remain victory in the 2016 referendum and a girlfriend who cried all through the night at the result, I think we know the type.
At the same time, Goodall is a hard-working journalist who doesn’t lack chutzpah and tells you stuff. There are two big stories here. First, that the next general election will not be a shoe-in for Corbyn. He will have to win sixty-two additional seats, predominantly in England, where
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