Yesterday’s heroes

The Labour peer and historian Kenneth Morgan is perhaps best known for his accounts of the Attlee government, Labour in Power, and the Lloyd George coalition, Consensus and Disunity, a work of considerable relevance for anyone seeking to understand the Cameron government. But his biographies of Callaghan and Foot have caused him to be labelled the Annigoni of Old Labour, his critics arguing that he covered over their warts with a pail of whitewash. Ages of Reform is a collection of Morgan’s shorter pieces, most of them already published, but in out-of-the-way places. They are well worth preserving in book form. Their central theme is the evolutionary and beneficent progress of the left in Britain — first the Liberals, then Labour — since 1832.

The first piece is on the Great Reform Act of 1832. By depriving the landed interest of its monopoly of political power, reform helped to define the character not only of the British state but also of the British left.