Up Close And Personal

摘要

It is hard to turn 8oo-plus pages of notes on such esoteric subjects as Jim Calla-ghan's dithering over an election date, or Gordon Brown's five tests for joining the euro, into a riveting read. That Hugo Young's accumulated notebooks amount to just that is due to two things. The first is that Young, an influential political columnist on the Sunday Times and then the Guardian who died in 2003, had incredibly good contacts and cultivated them relentlessly for upwards of 30 years. The second is that he meticulously summarised these off-the-record conversations as soon as he got to a desk. The result is a blow-by-blow account of what those who made recent British history were thinking as they did so, with no subsequent airbrushing out of the misjudgments of the moment.rnFor the most part, Young draws on a wide assortment of politicians, civil servants, union officials, diplomats and others to piece together the subtext of British politics. Young was more able than most to see the importance of Margaret Thatcher, although he did not share her politics. He was at his best in distilling complicated, fluid stories, such as the secession from the Labour Party of the Gang of Four in 1981 to set up the Social Democrats, for example, or the debate over whether the NewrnLabour government should hold a referendum on the euro (its failure to do so was a grave disappointment to the strongly pro-European Young). Alan Rusbridger, Young's editor at the Guardian, describes his columns as "like icebergs: readers saw a sunlit tip of crystal argument. They may have guessed but they never truly saw what lay beneath."