In political journalism, as in warfare, relish is taken in a parade of defectors. Media neocons will therefore cheer the publication of the very personal tale of one Observer journalist’s journey from the dovecote to the hawks’ nest, not least on the issue of global terrorism and fundamentalist Islam. The author — once what he calls a ‘left-liberal’ — now sees this as the greatest threat facing the West. ‘Wake up, and smell the cordite,’ he writes. Andrew Anthony is an inspired phrasemaker and the phrase will serve for many armchair crusaders as a six-word summary of a 300-page book.
Which is a pity, because this is a more interesting story than that. Honest (within its lights), deliciously caustic about its author’s former ideological stablemates, and sometimes moving in its humanity, we are given one man’s testament to the mid-life realisation that he had got his entire world view wrong. With a touch of Nick Hornby and something of John O’Farrell, Andrew Anthony is never sharper, funnier (or more shocking) than in his descriptions of ideological attitude-striking in 1980s Islington and Hackney. There are anecdotes that should make Margaret Hodge and Tessa Jowell blush, and I’ve never read a better record, first-hand, of the way comprehensive education and the right-on educational philosophies of 1970s schoolteachers let a bright boy from a poor background down. His account of a youthful mission to Nicaragua to help the Sandinistas is the first record I’ve read of an episode of leftist internationalism almost forgotten today.
Anthony is a vivid and sensitive writer with some good stories to tell; and, though the unrelentingly confessional style does sometimes grate, this, his first book, is clever, engaging and palpably sincere.
But there’s something wrong with his argument, and it goes to the heart of the matter.
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