I read it in one sitting during which I laughed, I cried, and I hated Thatcher all over again. After ten years of New Labour I can't help feeling that things haven't got a lot better, have they? I also found the ending profoundly depressing; was there really no alternative? ( )

So, hurray for Things Can Only Get Better - Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter by John O'Farrell. It's quite refreshing to zap through three hundred pages of undemanding but amusing text in a day. Refreshing too to find a life in left-wing politics recounted in such deprecating and light-hearted terms. The book covers the period between the General Elections of 1979 and 1997 during which time the Conservatives held power and Margaret Thatcher seemingly changed the face of Britain for ever. Now senility, illness and madness have turned her from an evil demoness into a pathetic, irrelevant, pitiable figure; even robbing us of the opportunity to gloat over her death when and if it occurs.
-
Ani (as in Schwarzenegger rather than Lennox) DiFranco sings, in an American context, in her song T'Is of Thee about the Republicans - Why don't just go ahead and turn off the sun? Because we'll never live long enough to undo everything they've done to you. Sentiments that, even through those scrambled pronouns, express what us on the left feel about Thatcher.
-
John O'Farrell, Labour candidate and comedy writer for such series as Spitting Image and Have I Got News For You and very occasionally even appearing in front of the camera, charts his experiences of working for the Labour party during these years of Tory dominance. He captures the insularity and self-destructive tendancies of the radical left and the inability of people on the left to comprehend how anybody with a spark of humanity can bring themselves to vote Conservative. To have been mocked by Sun-reading xenophobe, homophobe workmates was surely unbearable. How the toffee-nosed, upper class Tories can chortle and jibe over such indignities. Rupert Murdoch's poison is so pervasive he even has those people he is shafting on his side.
-
This is an interesting read in that it ends at the very beginning of Tony Blair's New Labour Revolution. Now, only ten years later, that is due to be swept away. It seems likely the Gordon Brown will be Prime Minister only for the remainder of this Parliament. Iraq, cash for questions and gongs makes Labour too easy a target for the Conservatives to lose the next General Election. They have a leader people might envisage as a possible PM and the overwhelming backing of both business and Murdoch's Empire. How can they possibly blow it?
-
And what has Blair achieved in these years of Labour control? Well, he wasn't even trying to turn the tanker around in the direction of socialist principles. The best he could do was chuck a few lifebelts overboard. ( )

Having canvassed at local elections myself, several of his campaign-trail anecdotes rang true.

I found it was a real page-turner and, like Nick Hornby, read it in a single sitting.

Ultimately it left me feeling disappointed. Perhaps that was the point, but politics doesn't end just because one becomes disillusioned.

In the light of the ensuing nine years of Blair's government, there is the danger of thinking that everything had to be thus.

There is no alternative is a battle-cry I never thought to hear from a Labour supporter! ( )