Current Affairs: Clare Short's compelling insights into the Blair government are marred by bitterness.
Clare Short is a woman scorned. From May, 1997, until March, 2003, she had been the darling of "old" Labour in Tony Blair's resolutely "new" Labour cabinet. In the run-up to the Iraq conflict, she was then publicly hostile to her own government, threatening to resign if Britain joined the invasion without a second UN mandate. That new authority did not come, and Britain went to war anyway. But instead of quitting, Clare Short stayed on. Her reward was vilification by her former friends on the left, and ridicule from Blair loyalists. Had she left in March, 2003, she might plausibly have brought down the government; by the time she eventually went, three months later, the moment had passed. Her reputation has yet to recover; political turncoats are rarely forgiven.
Written more in anger than sorrow, this memoir is suffused with a tone of bitterness and bile. Colleagues in cabinet are "so poodle-like". David Blunkett is a "silly man". Jack Straw is a Blair yes-man "doing his bidding". Even Robin Cook, who did what Short could not in resigning and keeping his credibility, failed on Iraq by "not [ having] spelled out a full position in Cabinet discussions".
An Honourable Deception? is a compelling insight into the workings of the Blair government. Contemporary history as a discipline is relatively new, but books such as this one make it possible. Even a generation ago most politicians disdained writing a "kiss and tell" on governments of which they were members, especially while an administration remained in office. Now a resigning minister's first port of call is to a publisher to collect a handsome advance before the public forgets who they are.
Opponents of the war, however, will be disappointed that Clare Short has no silver bullet for Tony Blair over Iraq. On the only matter that could now conceivably force the prime minister to resign - whether he put pressure on Peter Goldsmith, the attorney-general, to change advice about the legality of the war - Short can only speculate that "looking back it is difficult not to believe he was lent on".
But when she had the chance to grill Goldsmith at a special cabinet meeting only days before the war, she flunked it. Her weary conclusion now is that "one day we will know how the Attorney came to be persuaded that there was legal authority for war".
The real significance of An Honourable Deception? comes not through any telling revelations, but in its reinforcement of the image of Tony Blair as a commanding prime minister.
"He likes the stage, charm and PR rather than detail and truth," is Short's assessment. "Not a bad person - this is the man."
The impression left by her book is somewhat different. Few would doubt Blair's gift for performance, but he also appears throughout as a man in control of each aspect of government, markedly presidential in his decision-making, driven by conviction, and utterly ruthless in the pursuit of his own agenda.
By the end of An Honourable Deception? the reader has a sneaking sense that Short's government career ended in humiliation at least in part because she is an ineffective political operator. She made no attempt to build an alliance in cabinet with Robin Cook to still the drums of war. The potential coup de grâce to Blair's leadership was botched. She threw away the goodwill of colleagues who admired her whiter-than-white conviction by constant disloyalty and the flouting of collective responsibility in the media.
Short comes close to admitting her lack of tactical finesse. "I was not playing a political game," she writes. "I was trying to prevent my government from making a terrible mistake and to secure the best way forward after the first mistake had been made. For me, the political decisions I make are about the meaning of my life, and my contribution to society."
The lesson Short understood too late is that Blair does know how to play the game. And he always plays it to win.
An Honourable Deception? New Labour, Iraq, and the Misuse of Power by Clare Short, Free Press, 294pp. £15
Richard Aldous teaches history at UCD. His biography of Malcolm Sargent is published by Pimlico