Anthony Sampson

This book, republished after almost 40 years, has survived as a South African classic while most other memoirs about life under apartheid have been forgotten. It’s not just because it’s beautifully written, in a plain, unpretentious style, but also because it conveys, with acute observation, the combination of ordinariness and danger which is implicit in any totalitarian state. The author quotes W.H. Auden: ‘Suffering...takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.’ And she quietly conveys her own suffering as a political activist who was also a dedicated mother of young children, facing growing persecution, fear and eventual exile.

Has any prime minister been quite so insulated from Parliament and Cabinet? Blair’s solo performance last week, as he flew from Madrid to Libya to Brussels with his plane-load of captive journalists, was another reminder of how far Britain’s foreign policy revolves around a single man; while the procession departing from No. 10 has left him personally more isolated. As I’ve been inspecting again the Anatomy of Britain, I’ve been looking for times when No. 10 was similarly holed up over the last half-century. It’s true that Macmillan, Wilson and Thatcher were often accused of overcentralising power, but they all kept closer links with Parliament than has Blair, even in a crisis.