On our shoulders

Our politics is such a shallow game that any senior British politician who has read a book is apt to be considered cerebral, and if he has read two, feted as an original thinker. So I had never quite dispelled the suspicion that the nickname ‘Two-Brains’ might have been awarded to David Willetts for no better reason than that he knew his stuff, could talk like an academic, had a lively sense of the complexities of things, and sounded a little vague. I had wondered whether he might be one of those men to whom the learned footnote meant more than the useful conclusion.

This book goes a long way towards dispelling such suspicions. The Pinch is a powerful personal credo, a mine of information, and a solid and remorseless argument. It is the sort of work that gives intellectual spine to a whole political career. It assembles facts, it makes brave judgments, and it offers a conclusion that has large, obvious and quite immediate consequences for policy.