Tory Book Club: The Devil's Tune

To all (both) of you who have bombarded (emailed) me with desperate requests (idle queries) about the blog, I haven't posted for a year or so for the exact same reason that I wouldn't spend time and energy detailing day by day the onslaught of a terminal disease. After a certain point I found it became too dispiriting to keep chronicling and reacting to so much malevolence, vandalism and predatory greed in government, served up with self-righteous posturing and naked dishonesty, and I truly admire people like Sue Marsh who have managed to carry on with just such a chronicle. The bravest fighters in any resistance tend to be those to whom the regime poses the most existential threat; they can't afford to falter.

Still, in a spirit of conciliation with and curiosity about our sadistic and grasping sensible and conscientious rightwing overlords, I have decided to try to understand, as much as I can, the thinking that underpins their actions. After all, that thinking will also underpin much of whatever wheezes the next few governments come up with as well, given that all the parties are picking their MPs from ever smaller gene pools of hive-mind wonks, Etonian princelings and self-made maniacs determined to show they're no less ruthless than the Etonian princelings.

Rather than wade through their showboating pronouncements in Parliament (they tend to play to a particularly unlovely gallery, and anyway that would just be too much of a busman's holiday), in an occasional series I shall be approaching them through their published works, because hey, these wrists won't slit themselves.

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1. Iain Duncan Smith, The Devil’s Tune, 2003

( Prepare to have your preconceptions challenged )

( though not necessarily by this review )