David Runciman

Tony Blair emerges from these memoirs as a man of extraordinary intellectual self-confidence. He likes to think for himself, and decide for himself, whatever the issue. He takes this to be one of the key attributes of leadership, and it is why he believes he was cut out for it while other people (you can guess who) were not. But he also puts it down to his training as a barrister at the hands of Derry Irvine, someone he describes as having ‘a brain the size of a melon’. From Irvine Blair learned the importance of what he calls ‘drilling down’ when faced with a seemingly intractable problem.

For Carl Schmitt, political romantics are driven not by the quest for pseudo-religious certainty, but by the search for excitement, for the romance of what he calls ‘the occasion’. They want something, anything, to happen, so that they can feel themselves to be at the heart of things. They are ostensibly self-sufficient yet also have a desperate need for human comradeship. They loathe abuses of power, but invariably end up worshipping power itself, sometimes indiscriminately. Above all, in place of God they substitute themselves. All of this sounds a lot like Christopher Hitchens.

However you juggle the numbers, in Scottish terms this new Westminster government really is a coalition of losers. But in the end it was even harder to see how that other possible coalition of losers – a Labour/ Lib Dem alliance – could have forced through tax rises in England, where the Tories have a clear majority of seats and had a margin of victory over Labour in the popular vote of more than 11 per cent. Politics in the UK is now comprehensively out of sync. If the public finances were in better shape, this might not matter so much. But with horribly difficult choices to be made by whoever is in power, the pressures are bound to build.

Along with a good lawyer, an agent and a PR representative, celebrity miscreants now need an enabler: the person who indulged them in their vices and so can be blamed for failing to get them to stop. ‘Who enabled Tiger Woods?’ is one of those questions, like ‘Who lost China?’, that seems to demand an answer, when really it is just a way of avoiding the fact that Tiger...

At moments Clinton rants and rages, at others he becomes tearful, occasionally he gets bored and sometimes he even falls asleep. One memorable exchange, just after he has been trounced in the 1994 midterm elections, begins with Clinton in the White House barber’s chair, exhausted and frequently nodding off mid-sentence, only to rouse himself for a renewed bout of defiance and self-pity before slumping back again. Branch leaves him still talking to himself, and wonders if the president is suffering from narcolepsy, or something worse.