Blair the actor, Brown the grump?

„In life, as in the index, Brown follows Blair. The result? Defeat, disaster and derangement according to the former prime minister's memoirs, which are in one sense a sustained answer to the most important question about their shared government. Did they disagree about policy, or personality, or both? Easy wisdom paints their relationship as a tragedy: two men, the best of friends with a shared ideological project, pulled apart by jealously. It was all a terrible clash of personality and the loser was Labour.

Except according to Blair it wasn't like that at all. Yes, there is lots in the book to justify that old slogan the Democrats used against Barry Goldwater: In your guts you know he's nuts. Brown was nuts, at least according to the Blair version (and he's surely right). More like a cult than a kirk, he says of Brown's allies. But, as he says – repeatedly – Brown didn't lose because he was a bit weird socially. He lost because he was wrong.

This insight will upset Blair's party (or is it former party?). Almost all of those still in it believe the financial crisis demanded the massive expansion of the state. They think the deficit was unimportant. They think tax rises were morally and economically correct. They turned against markets. And Blair thinks they were wrong about all of this. It's this that counts: not the fact that Brown was bad at small talk and chewed his fingernails.”