John Grimond

This Boy is no ordinary politician’s memoir, still less a politician’s ordinary memoir. It ends where others might begin: when the author is barely 18, newly married and only just starting work as a postman. The trade unionism that he later took up and the career in politics that led to several cabinet posts in two Labour governments are not even hinted at. Yet however thrilling, their story, when it is told, will be dull by comparison with this. Alan Johnson had a childhood quite unlike most politicians’, and he describes it with a simplicity and power that make it easy to see why he came to be the potential Labour leader most feared by many Conservatives.

An unkind thought keeps coming to mind as you read this book: perhaps Henry Ford was right, after all. It is unkind because so much of Guy Arnold’s great opus is admirable. As an account of the main political events that have taken place in Africa since 1960, it is awe-inspiring, some might even say awesome. Arnold’s ability to assemble facts, everywhere from the Cape to Cairo, from Dakar to Djibouti, is as commendable as his clear, jargon-free style. Yet, if his history is not bunk, it is certainly deeply unsatisfying. It contains hardly an original observation and provides no clear answers to the difficult questions about Africa, in particular, ‘What’s wrong with the place and why doesn’t it work?