55 hours well spent

Plus, the most toxic Newsnight panel ever assembled

Books

What It Takes: The Way to the White House by Richard Ben Cramer

Is there an English word for that aching feeling of — “loss” sounds ridiculous — but whatever it is when you finish a book and there's absence where there was once abundance?

That’s what I felt at the denouement of this remarkable book, one that is so frequently cited by political journalists that I feel slightly stupid adding my name to the list. It’s a bit, oh, so you travelled to Japan and liked it? Groundbreaking.

At more than 1,000 pages or, in my case, 55 hours of audio, it is not designed for people with a job, childcare responsibilities or really hobbies of any kind. What it does is manufacture a sort of open-world video game sensation, as the author flits between the campaigns of six men hoping to win their party’s nomination for the 1988 presidential election.

So we are introduced to Vice President George H. W. Bush and Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole on the Republican side, Representative Dick Gephardt, Governor Michael Dukakis and Senators Joe Biden and Gary Hart on the Democratic side. We get to know them long before they sought that highest office, and even at their most undignified, one can’t help but admire their courage and indefatigability in the face of circumstance or a bitchy media.

Painstakingly researched with upwards of 1,000 interviews, it is also beautifully crafted, with a prose and ease of reading that distinguishes it from the more panoramic styles of Robert Caro and Stephen Kotkin. I look forward to reading it again, but not for a couple of decades.

Video

Newsnight Review — The Alastair Campbell Diaries (2007)

What begins with a perfectly adequate Kirsty Wark interview with Campbell devolves into a four-way, all-male tussle involving the former Conservative MP Michael Portillo and the journalists Andrew Gilligan, John Harris and Michael White.

The only way to describe the quantum of awfulness is to note that White, then assistant editor at The Guardian, was the least sanctimonious contributor. Portillo took a detour from his long train journey to national treasure status to remind viewers why he was so disliked in the first place while Harris is just a little too knowing.

But really, it is all about Gilligan, the man who in May 2003 reported on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that a senior intelligence source had told him the Iraq War dossier had been “sexed up”, a claim Campbell vehemently denied. What followed was Dr David Kelly’s death and the Hutton Inquiry, whose findings were highly critical of Gilligan and the BBC.

I’m not a Campbell stan — you couldn’t pay me to listen to The Rest Is Politics — but Gilligan’s demeanour is so putrid, his determination to be unpleasant so unwavering that it starts to function as a closing statement for the defence.