Betrayed by their disciples

It’s rarely encouraging when a book apologises three times on the first page for its content. First, Tim Congdon regrets that his latest book, a history of monetary policy in post-war Britain, has no proper chapters, but is simply a loose compilation of academic essays and journalistic vignettes. Second, he’s sorry for skipping between the first-person ‘I’ in his journalism, and the avoidance of personal pronouns in the more academic pieces. Finally, he’s contrite about the repetition that could have been reduced ‘with harsher editing’.

Congdon is a polemicist, and one of his rhetorical tricks is to apologise for his own deficiencies before a rival has the chance to point them out. It doesn’t work all the time: his apologies for his repetitiveness alone are gratingly repetitive. But he gets in a few good clinchers throughout, and if one can get past the redundancy, the book’s worth reading.

It’s best described as a salvation effort. First, he tries to save the memory of John Maynard Keynes from the ‘Keynesians’. Second, he tries to rewrite the history of British monetary policy in the early 1980s. Third, he tries to save his own reputation from the rival economists he’s sparred with over the years. His greatest quarrel is with the Keynesians, the group of left-leaning economists who Congdon thinks managed to get most of Keynes’s best ideas entirely wrong. Here Congdon is at his most interesting. In some ways, his revisionist reading of Keynes as a hero of the Right is somewhat debatable. (Congdon’s opinion may be overly biased by his belief in the Thatcherite mantra of a small state and unfettered markets. He is apoplectic over the Tory party’s recent contrition for its own economic policies. In a recent online article, he threatens to vote Ukip if the modernist David Cameron remains as leader.)