George Osborne

American Dynastyby Kevin PhillipsPenguin/Allen Lane, £18.99, pp. 397, ISBN 071399746X The prosperous Floridan seaside resort of Sarasota should be natural Bush country. Home to golf courses, marinas and retirement condos, the town’s Republican Congress- woman Katherine Harris shot to fame in the 2000 presidential election as the official appointed by Governor Jeb Bush to make sure the Florida recount gave the right result. Last month, a friend of mine who is an astute observer of American politics was having lunch in a Sarasota shopping mall and saw something significant. A young man was selling ‘Help Beat Bush’ badges to passing shoppers — not just one or two but dozens of them. People were stopping and queuing to buy them, and then pinning them on.

Here’s a good rule of thumb: never read a book by a politician running for office. Whether it is George W. Bush’s folksy evangelism in A Charge to Keep or the then Opposition Leader Tony Blair’s toe-curdlingly awful New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country, they are all the same. Safe, saccharine, ghost-written by some aide, full of ‘let me tell you about the wonderful lady I met helping inner city kids’, they are little more than political manifestos with a dust jacket. However, every rule has its exception. General Wesley Clark’s Winning Modern Wars is just such an exception. Perhaps that is because Clark says he wrote the book this summer, before he finally decided last month to run for the presidency. Thankfully, it shows.