Book in the news: a thorough hatchet job on the Labour leader

Book review: Dangerous Hero Tom Bower's biography of Jeremy Corbyn book details his personal and political lives, from his childhood to becoming Labour leader in one of the “great accidents of political history”.

Dr Matthew Partridge
By
published
in Features

938-books-Dangerous-Hero

Corbyn's Ruthless Plot For Power

HarperCollins (£20)

Buy on Amazon

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"It's usually bad news for a prominent personage when Tom Bower decides to write their biography", as he "seems only to alight on someone because he has already decided that they're a bad lot", says David Aaronovitch in The Times. His latest "thorough hatchet job" is of Jeremy Corbyn. The book ranges over both Corbyn's personal and political lives, from his childhood to the "35 wilderness years" he spent between being elected MP for Islington North and becoming Labour leader in one of the "great accidents of political history".

"Much of Bower's book, or at least the general narrative, will be familiar to most political observers," says Tom Harris in The Daily Telegraph. However, thanks to "some entertaining and impressive research", a "new layer of detail has been added to the picture". We learn, for example, that Corbyn expected and hoped "to be leading a Labour-SNP coalition government" in the aftermath of the last general election. And it's not just Corbyn who comes under the spotlight as Bower relates, in "painful detail", the "miserable machinations of Theresa May and her ministers in trying to sort out Brexit". Overall, this is a "meticulous and highly readable account" of the Labour leader that is both "funny and devastating".

Nonsense, says Stephen Bush in The Guardian. After reading this book, "you couldn't pay me to read" any of Bower's other biographies. It is filled with "general sneering" at the Labour leader, but it is also littered with "rudimentary errors", such as apparently confusing one of Corybn's supporters with a pop singer. The book is a "dismal failure" that "tells us nothing we don't already know" and its judgment is off, condemning Corbyn's decision to skip a meaningless Arsenal match with the same intensity as it does his failure to tackle anti-Semitism within his party.

Dr Matthew Partridge
Dr Matthew Partridge
Shares editor, MoneyWeek

Matthew graduated from the University of Durham in 2004; he then gained an MSc, followed by a PhD at the London School of Economics.

He has previously written for a wide range of publications, including the Guardian and the Economist, and also helped to run a newsletter on terrorism. He has spent time at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and the consultancy Lombard Street Research.

Matthew is the author of Superinvestors: Lessons from the greatest investors in history, published by Harriman House, which has been translated into several languages. His second book, Investing Explained: The Accessible Guide to Building an Investment Portfolio, is published by Kogan Page.

As senior writer, he writes the shares and politics & economics pages, as well as weekly Blowing It and Great Frauds in History columns He also writes a fortnightly reviews page and trading tips, as well as regular cover stories and multi-page investment focus features.

Follow Matthew on Twitter: @DrMatthewPartri

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