Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour

In the year 2000, English journalist Andrew Rawnsley issued SERVANTS OF THE PEOPLE: THE INSIDE STORY OF NEW LABOUR. It covered Prime Minister Tony Blair's British Labour Party's rule during its first three years in office, beginning in May 1997. The first edition of SERVANTS OF THE PEOPLE was in circulation before the end of Labour's first term. The very next year, 2001, Rawnsley produced a revised post-election edition, published by Penguin Books, including five new chapters and a largely reworked original text. Rawnsley carryied the Labour government 13 months farther along, through the end of its first of three consecutive terms in office. In 2010 the author would round out his saga with THE END OF THE PARTY: THE RISE AND FALL OF NEW LABOUR. *** SERVANTS OF THE PEOPLE (2nd edition) ends with Labour's first back-to-back national election victory in 101 years. Blair & Co. pulled off what no previous Labour Party ever did. "Old" Labour had been the party of equality for all and "down with privilege!" "New" Labour was the creation of four men, according to Rawnsley: Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell. They are the four "stars" of SERVANTS OF THE PEOPLE, though they interact with a cast of dozens of other. ***New Labour's goal was to change the direction of Britain from Conservatism to Progressivism in the 21st Century. Key issues were health care and education, reform of the House of Lords, devolution of power to Wales and Scotland and integration with Europe. Soon moving across the plates of Prime Minister Blair and Chancellor of the Exchequer Brown were, however, the death of Princess Diana, killings in Northern Ireland, a war in Kosovo, a unified European currency, foot and mouth disease outbreaks among domesticated animals, and much else besides. *** The second revised edition of SERVANTS OF THE PEOPLE is 568 pages long, of which xix pages go to a preface and introduction and 24 chapters and 508 pages are for narrative, hypothesizing, analyzing and commentary. There are no maps or charts. This is not history, but ripped raw pre-history. Rawnsley, via off the record interviewing, persistently and systematically pried open the tightly closed small inner circle of New Labour as no other British writer was doing. He may have been the first to flag the never-ending tussles between Premier Blair and veto-wielding Chancellor Brown. *** This book was a new approach a semi-selective antidote to the then prevailing non-selective instant "avalanche" reporting of every gossipy tidbit and scandal that the tabloids could lay hands on or invent. Before SERVANTS OF THE PEOPLE, a British government would be gone for ten or twenty years before its participants began to come clean in self-serving memoirs. *** SERVANTS OF THE PEOPLE: THE INSIDE STORY OF NEW LABOUR sprawls and rambles. Nothing stands out as more important than anything else. The Queen, whom Prime Ministers are supposed to advise and serve, comes across as one large irrelevancy to Brtish life. We learn a fair amount about the Liberal Democratic party but little of the feckless Tories. Of Bill Clinton there is plenty: as early model to Tony Blair for media savvy and as later, distracted by l'affaire Lewinsky, requiring a wise Blair to build a fire under America over Kosovo. *** Bottom Line: I can think of no friends to whom I can unconditionally commend this meandering, unfocused, often boring, shallow book. -OOO-