Bitter-sweet story of two failing loves - a wife and a political party. Both met in the heat of anti-Thatcherite struggles and both sadly empty of meaning and life by the noughties. Told with his usual sense of humour. ( )

I bought this book after seeing Mark live in Birmingham. I was anticipating a mix of side-splitting comedy and radical politics. The side-splitting bit was in the comedy club where I saw him; before I could read the book. I'd heard him re-use a lot of the same material on BBC Radio 4, and by the time I got to read the book, I had calmed down from the 'nearly wetting myself' position to merely smiling and nodding a lot.

That's not to say this isn't a very funny book; it is. But as the book can't convey Mark's own almost perfect impersonation of Tony Benn (to name but one example), it is now for me more a souvenir of a damn' fine night out.

But there's more. Mark's connections with the British Far Left, in the form of the Socialist Workers' Party, and his account of his gradual disillusionment set against the almost simultaneous disintegration of his marriage, is both readable and sadly accurate. Whilever the Left had intellectual credit from its position as one pole of a bicameral political debate, the ultra-orthodoxy of the Far Left had a certain amount of cachet because of it being the purest strain of socialist thought available and directly traceable to its roots. Much of its analysis is accurate, especailly its own critique of Soviet communism as merely a form of state capitalism that relies far too heavily on mechanisms of state repression to be a faithful enactment of Marxist teaching. But the way in which the Far Left fragments and turns in on itself whilst ignoring the wider issues and building mass movements to mobilise opposition to the way we are governed now is a tragedy of the West. Mark Steel shows this process in closer focus, but Leftists and former Leftists from many lands will sadly be able to attest to the truth of what he writes.

His prognosis - that it is down to individuals to carry forward the battle against the forces of corporatism and capital in 1001 little struggles and individual minor victories that one day might well build or accrete into a bigger movement is a little depressing, because it suggests that the game is to be a long one that many of us will not live to see the end of. But he thinks that it carries within it the seeds of acheiving a fairer, better society for all of us. And I think in this, he is right. ( )

A funny yet slightly ranty view of the last decade of British politics. Intertwined with musing on getting older and the collapse of relationships.
Well written and equal parts fascinating, poignant and funny.
Not quite my politics but still worth reading. ( )