Tom Harris

Tom Harris writes very well, sometimes he's even funny. This book is not simply a piece of party political propoganda, it can be enjoyed even if you're not a Labour supporter (although maybe best avoided if you're a particulary sensitive Liberal Democrat.) Tom Harris is not the sort of politician who is only interested in articulating whatever the party line happens to be.

On the negative side, this is essentially a collection of blog posts rather than a book. I bought the kindle edition and read it on my phone, it felt at times as if I could have been financially better off reading the archives of this blog and I wouldn't have missed much. The posts had been rearranged into category, but I felt that it would perhaps have been better if the effort had been made to construct them into some sort of tangential narrative. Stanzas at the end of posts inviting people to comment added to the sense that possibly more could have been done to tweak the original blog posts for the audience reading them as a book.

The member for Glasgow South describes himself as having become a blogger who is also an MP rather than a politican who blogs. While he cites this as a reason for stopping the blog, I think that ,while it still existed, the readers were the richer for this. We are givem, what appears to be, an honest insight into the life of a member of parliament in todays "post democratic" era.… (mehr)