The book was reviewed by one Philip Gould.It was not vouchsafed to Guardian readers that the reviewer was one of the PR consultants who created New Labour and was in the business at that very moment in time of selling the new leader-in-waiting to the credulous British public.

So when the reviewer insisted that Brown’s book was very moving and entirely devoid of cynicism and talked of New Labour’s vast achievements over the previous decade many must have believed him.After all,Guardian readers are not known for their powers of discrimination and discernment-or they wouldn’t be reading such a rag in the first place!

Readers might have taken pause to reconsider the accuracy of Gould’s gushing account of the book had they been reminded that the title and format bore uncanny resemblances to a work by another political aspirant who was himself in an earlier decade trying to raise his own political profile.

In 1956 JFK was cajoled by his father into writing a book called Profiles in Courage.Old Joe Kennedy who’d made the family’s millions as a bootlegger during Prohibition made sure his vast entourage of staff bought copies of son,Jack’s book in huge quantities in order that it made the best-seller list.

Not only did the JFK Courage book reach the best-seller list it also won a Pulitzer the following year.

Funny thing was,as many of his biographers have pointed out,Jack’s investment in the book had been minimal in comparison to that of members of his father’s staff and Jack’s research associate Ted Sorensen.Jack’s handwritten original bore scant resemblance to the finished product and the writing and research had largely been conducted by members of Joe’s staff.

Nowadays we’d probably refer to Jack’s work as ghost-written!

According to Gould,Brown’s Courage:8 Portraits includes,aside from Edith Cavell,MLK,Mandela,includes a chapter on Bobby Kennedy where the obsequious reviewer notes that our hero and PM-in-waiting portrays him as the archetypal New Labour politician.One who began as hard McCarthyite Attorney General but became ultimately a touchy-feely liberal aspirant to Presidential office.

In the light of this brief history whether the Brown Courage book was like the JFK one on the same subject entirely uncynical and nothing to do with profile-raising is a little more open to doubt.As is the question as to whether both were ghost-written products!

Ultimately we’ll probably never know since the man most likely to have been involved in ghostwriting the Brown book was allowed by the Guardian also to review it!

In the year since the would-be Kennedyesque Brown’s book on courage was published ample evidence has been provided that its so-called author was not best qualified to write a book on the topic at all!

Gould evidently wrote the appalling review of what was likely mostly his own book while he was at the Hay festival promoting his own book.

The Unfinished Revolution:How the Modernizers Saved the Labour Party was Gould’s rather absurd title.

Any takers?

Preston’s piece is even more sick-making than the stuff Anthony is apparently churning out.He uses the typically timely and nauseatingly public conversion of Blair to Catholicism to try and sketch another pathetically tired invocation of English moderation and reticence on religious matters.

The intellectual class of educated liberals could have spent the last decade enlightening us about Islam,the perspective of other nationalities and states generally so that no-one would have thought the illegal and immediate recourse to war in the Balkans,Afghanistan and Iraq by a so-called mature democracy was a worthy position to assume in world affairs.

Preston in the Blair conversion story could have reminded us of the number of dictators,torturers and war criminals who the Catholic Church has taken warmly thus to its bosom over centuries.Given the glaringly authoritarian features of Blair’s conceptual framework,indeed of the government he ran,Preston could have mused on the likelihood of the next step in Blair’s illustrious career being his beatification!

Alas,in the world without irony the corporate media has created Preston missed the opportunity to do any these things.

Anthony’s current best-seller sounds utterly crass and vomit-inducing but naturally its plot around a self-appointed liberal waking up and suddenly going through a Damascene conversion to the War on Terror and a bout of equally shallow soul-searching about his devotion to the liberal ideal is bound to win him friends in the Zionist-backed corporate media.

It’s a shame that Milne felt the need to give the book some thoroughly undeserved early publicity.

When push comes to shove all these hacks,even Milne have been signed up to the “War on Terror” since 9/11.Islamic militancy is the subtext to this war and like the largely fictional Cold War invented by Churchill and Truman they will likely run with the story and make their livings from it for the next thirty years or so.

As for a little prima donna-like bout of soul-searching- well that’s good copy too.

When Randolph Bourne contemplated the role of the intelligentsia in succumbing all too easily to the break with neutralism that prefigured America’s entry into WW1 in 1917 he wrote-

Never having felt responsibility for labour wars and oppressed masses and excluded races at home,they had found a large fund of idle emotional capital to invest in oppressed nationalities(read Kurds,marsh Arabs,Bosnians,Kosovans etc)
elsewhere….

It was ever thus.