Readers’ review: Darling’s ripping memoir

When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in 2007, the Labour party was split into three camps: those who genuinely adored Brown, those who believed he could change (elected as New Gordon, govern as New Gordon?) and a deflated Blairite rump that had given up the ghost.  It is not immediately clear which of these camps is most reprehensible.

But the most culpable were those who knew that a Brown premiership would be a disaster and still allowed it to happen, including Tony Blair, who, as Alistair Darling reveals in this brilliant autobiography, said at the beginning of his premiership that working with Gordon Brown was “like facing the dentist’s drill without an anaesthetic”.

But the torrent of tales about Brown in office has become so hateful and humiliating, this latest account cannot tell us much about the man that we did not already know. The Guardian’s Marina Hyde has sympathetically