Sir Tom Devine on the battle for Labour's soul

Bloomsbury £20

This survey of the history of the Labour Party from the 1970s through to the present has been written by David Kogan, a former journalist and senior television executive.‎ Some of his colleagues in the media have already enthusiastically welcomed the book with a series of golden opinions either printed on the jacket of the volume or in press reviews.

So, for Nick Robinson of the BBC it is "the definitive account". With that sweeping judgement Robinson manages to ignore the sage advice popularised by the late Philip Grahame of the Washington Post that "journalism is but the first rough draft of history".

Rachel Sylvester in The Times finds the book "meticulous", despite the fact that no other published works on the subject are cited in it, no references in support of the many assertions can be found (apart from personal interviews conducted with politicians and others by the author himself) and no concluding bibliography appears of sources used. To some readers, these three omissions might seem of little account. To this reviewer, however, their inclusions are essential if the book is to have any hope of passing the tests of intellectual credibility or substantive significance.

Robert Peston also waxes eloquent in his claims for the volume: "Kogan turns on its head our understanding of Labour's history over the past 50 years." The only semi-charitable comment that can be made about this assertion is that it suggests Mr Peston has not read much recent British political history.

‎The book is not by any means inconsequential but neither is it Robinson's "definitive acount". In essence it is something of a curate's egg, good in some parts but disappointing in others. The less impressive chapters ‎comprise the first half of the 400-odd pages of the volume, a narrative of the trials, tribulations and some successes of the Labour Party between Harold Wilson's premiership and the election of Ed Miliband as leader.

Kogan presents the party's history at that time as a rollercoaster hurtling between the forces of the right and the left. But, apart from some details, there is little new in the account of a period which has been already covered by others in more analytical depth.

Given the lurid descriptions of the ferocity of internal factionalism within the party, the reader waits patiently for the expected key discussion: why, despite all the mayhem, did Labour not disintegrate and implode as a political force?However, we wait in vain; the question is not even raised far less assessed and answered.

Then ‎there is the serious flaw of an all-encompassing Anglocentric and Londoncentric approach throughout the text. Apart from a few very brief references, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales hardly surface. The loss of Scotland for Labour has enormous electoral implications for the party's aspirations to form a government once again but it does not merit detailed consideration despite the availability of much published research on the collapse of Labour hegemony north of the border. The associated question around why Corbynism seems not to have the same mass appeal among the party's rank and file in Scotland as it does elsewhere in the UK would also have been worthy of evaluation.

Too much space is taken up with the recitation of dreary minutes of long-forgotten committee meetings within the Westminster bubble which cannot be of much interest to anyone other than those who attended and can now see their names appear in print. Narrative and the compilation of facts are necessary but not sufficient. The force of historical writing surely lies at root in interpretation, argument and vigorous analysis.

This part of the book reads like a narrow political history but politics do not exist in a vacuum. Its processes are obviously and vitally fashioned by economic, social and cultural factors both at home and abroad which influence the cut and thrust of party politics. It is therefore not possible to write a meaningful history of a political party without consistent contextualisation of these externalities. Once again, in this respect the volume is found wanting.

It is only when the book reaches the era of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership that it comes alive and can be seen to break new ground.‎ Kogan uses his excellent contacts in the higher echelons of the Labour movement, including the parliamentary party, trade unions and ancillary groups, to good effect.Through a series of fascinating interviews with key people he charts and explains Corbyn's extraordinary rise to the leadership of Labour.

The mood of the party membership was already swinging to the left after Ed Miliband's general election defeat. Many saw New Labour as a betrayal of old Labour values and had also been appalled by Tony Blair's role in the invasion of Iraq. On both issues, Corbyn had shown resolute oppostion from the back benches. He was not tarnished with the sins of the past but seemed to represent a clean break with what had gone before.

Then there was the massive change in the membership of the party which took place before the Labour leadership elections in 2015. As Kogan writes: "The transformation from May to August 2015 was seismic. Throwing the doors open to a new class of supporter paying only £3 per head had turned Labour into a mass party at lightning speed." By September of that year it had more than half a million supporters who could vote in the leadership election.

Many were young and had never been in the Labour movement before, or even politically active. This was the generation that has suffered from long years of austerity, benefit cuts and, in England, increases in university tuition fees. Amazingly, Corbyn, the veteran left-winger‎ who had never held ministerial office, struck a chord with the young with promises of a better tomorrow through the implementation of radical social and economic policies.

At the start, however, few thought he had much chance of winning the leadership. Though elected to Parliament in 1983 he had little profile outside Westminster and his kind of left-wing politics had long been outside the Labour mainstream. One supporter noted: "Obviously we are not going to win but this a really important opportunity for the stuff that the left has been espousing for Ken [Livingstone] to come through". Corbyn was therefore seen as a stalking horse for the much more high profile Livingstone to eventually come to the fore as the potential champion of the left.

Corbyn took part in a Newnight debate with other contenders after he managed to have his name included on the ballot paper. "The cameras panned across the politicians and there was Andy Burnham looking like a politician, Yvette Cooper looking like a politician, Liz Kendall looking like a politician and Jeremy Corbyn looking like an ageing beatnik."

The old beatnik, however, had the last laugh. Changes in the rules for leadership contests worked in his favour. It was now one member one vote, which massively diminished the former hegemony of the parliamentary party. The great wave of new members were impressed by Corbyn's authenticity and saw him as uncontaminated by past mistakes. The tight-knit group of battle-hardened veterans around the candidate soon discovered the electoral power of social media. Traditional techniques were abandoned and replaced by electronic methods and phone banking which allowed the campaign to reach out to the many thousands of new members‎.

After a ‎stumbling beginning, Corbyn started to make an impact at political rallies.He came across as a "decent bloke" with strong principles and a sartorial image which was in sharp contrast to the men in suits of New Labour.

Finally, as his campaign gathered momentum, the big left-leaning unions began to come on board. When the executive of Unite switched from Andy Burnham to Corbyn his campaign not only gained credibility but staff and resources which gave him a significant competitive edge over his rivals.

Since those heady days much of the shine has been taken off the Corbyn brand. His failure to reach out across the parliamentary party, studied ambivalence over Brexit and apparent failure to weed out anti-semitism within Labour have all begun to alienate former supporters.

‎Nevertheless, as this is written, opinion polls are showing Labour achieving a clear lead over the Tories as the political backlash against their failure to achieve Brexit intensifies. They have been crucified by terrible divisions over Europe. But it might be that an even more horrifying nightmare for the Conservative Party is now a possibility: the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn kissing hands in Buckingham Palace as the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.