Not quite there yet

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.