Things Can Only Get Better

John O'Farrell

All of the reviews of this book amount to more or less the same summary - it's Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch with the Labour Party and politics taking the place of Arsenal and football. And they're right. Years of defeat and disappointment culminating in one huge, cathartic victory. And on the way our hero grows up, finds a job, joins the middle classes and ends up worrying that his tribal passion has been diluted by marriage and family. It's even structured like Fever Pitch, with each chapter devoted loosely to an electoral battle of some kind, a general election here, a council by-election there. And like Fever Pitch it's a good read.

So what's a an old Tory like me doing happily chuckling along with an account of years of Labour struggle? Well, the best jokes are always told by insiders. Some of the funniest stories in the book are of fellow lefties at the height of their activist passion - for example, the friend whose Tube journeys always involve about 17 different stops because he won't use the Jubilee Line in protest against the monarchy.

And most of the book is in that same humourous vein. O'Farrell was never hard left, so although there is a good dose of anti-Tory invective there is also plenty of humour at Labour's expense. Occasionally some serious political point is made and almost always without getting too preachy. One chapter, however, does get horribly pious and that's the one dealing with voter apathy in the Euro-elections which occurred just after the Tianenman Square massacre. Turnout was poor, as it always is with Euro-elections and O'Farrell rants on about how little time it takes to vote and a crass comparison is made with the Chinese students fighting and dying for their chance to vote. And I'm thinking, you just don't get it do you? The Euro-elections - who asked for them? Nobody fought or died, nobody even campaigned or petitioned for another useless tier of elections to be foisted upon us. Ignoring them completely is a perfect exercise of our democratic freedoms.

Apart from that, I enjoyed the book very much. O'Farrell's follow-up novel appears to have received a bit of a kicking. But after the disastrous experience of campaigning for Labour in the 1980s I'm sure he's equipped to cope with a minor setback like that.