Good biographers love their subjects. But you can take that love too far. Walter Reid’s new biography of Labour’s first prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, passes the first test of biography. Reid loves his interesting if elusive protagonist, and we can read his well-written book like a good novel, always eager to see what happens to this strange and not unsympathetic man next.

The catch is that he loves his protagonist too much, always leaping instinctively to MacDonald’s defence and upbraiding his critics. So he has written good biography, but poor history.

Reid calls MacDonald ‘the cancelled prime minister’ and complains of the harsh treatment that historians and the Labour Party have meted out to him. ‘He has been cancelled, his image cut out of the Politburo Labour photograph,’ he writes at one point. MacDonald was never ‘cancelled’ and there was no