Bøger af Andy McSmith

During a long career in journalism, Andy McSmith encountered Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in a Siberian town called Bratsk; dined with Sir Edward Heath in his home in Salisbury; was mugged in the street while visiting Moscow with John Major; and knew Boris Johnson as a colleague with an ambition to be something more than just a journalist.

Updated since the May 1997 election, this book gives an insight into a range of Labour politicans - including, Tony Blair, John Prescott, Peter Mandelson and Clare Short - in a series of portraits.

'Affable, invisible... the man with a brilliant future behind him.' Thus Varsity magazine appraised Kenneth Clarke's term as President of the Cambridge Union in the summer of 1963. Dominated by his opposition to the admission of women students to the Union, Clarke's Presidency had been less than distinguished. But Varsity, like so many commentators throughout Clarke's political career, seriously underestimated a politician who, three decades later, has emerged as a strong man within a weak Conservative administration, often tipped as a possible successor to John Major should the bailiffs be summoned to Number Ten.Clarke, as Andy McSmith explains in this fast-paced and highly readable biography, is above all a survivor who has been a government minister since 1979. Despite his reputation as the 'thinking man's lager lout', Clarke is an old-fashioned 1960s One-Nation Tory who played the tough guy with considerable adroitness in order to survive under Thatcher's hard-line administration. Displaying the same joviality which has seen him sign up for both the Campaign for Social Democracy and the Conservative Club on arrival at Cambridge, Clarke frankly admitted in the 1970s that it was only the arithmetic of Britain's first-past-the-post election system which kept him in the same party as the British nationalists of the Tory right. His pragmatism served him well as he progressed from being the youngest high-flier in the Heath government to the Minister responsible for introducing the highly controversial 'internal market' in the NHS under Thatcher, and now to the happy position of Chancellor of the Exchequer with an economy recovering from recession.Clarke's presence at the heart of the Tory government demonstrates that the mix of free-market liberalism and British nationalism to which Mrs Thatcher gave her name never really took root in the Conservative government. Right-wing Tory rebels who plead that the EC is destroying Britain as a nation-state, or free-market ideologues who want to privitize whatever remains of the welfare state, find Kenneth Clarke an obstacle to their ambitions. From Clarke's point of view, social instability and trade barriers are bad for business. The rise and rise of this most flexible of politicians, according to Andy McSmith's engaging account, may not be enough to stop the cracks in a Tory Party now beyond repair.

Journalist Any McSmith brings together the stories of artists who worked at great risk during Stalinist Russia, one of the most oppressive regimes in world history.

The 1980s was the revolutionary decade of the twentieth century. To look back in 1990 at the Britain of ten years earlier was to look into another country. The changes were not superficial, like the revolution in fashion and music that enlivened the 1960s; nor were they quite as unsettling and joyless as the troubles of the 1970s. And yet they were irreversible. By the end of the decade, society as a whole was wealthier, money was easier to borrow, there was less social upheaval, less uncertainty about the future. Perhaps the greatest transformation of the decade was that by 1990, the British lived in a new ideological universe where the defining conflict of the twentieth century, between capitalism and socialism, was over. Thatcherism took the politics out of politics and created vast differences between rich and poor, but no expectation that the existence of such gross inequalities was a problem that society or government could solve - because as Mrs Thatcher said, 'There is no such thing as society ... people must look to themselves first.'From the Falklands war and the miners' strike to Bobby Sands and the Guildford Four, from Diana and the New Romantics to Live Aid and the 'big bang', from the Rubik's cube to the ZX Spectrum, McSmith's brilliant narrative account uncovers the truth behind the decade that changed Britain forever.