A confession: I do not like memoirs, at least not political ones. History might not be, as Tony Webster claims in Julian Barnes’s novel The Sense of an Ending, the lies of the victors, or, as his teacher does, the self-delusions of the defeated, but political memoirs certainly are.
It’s a truism that everyone is the hero of their own story, but one that almost every memoir proves at excessive length. Take Speaking Out by Ed Balls, which was actually quite good for the genre. The chapter headlined “Mistakes” concerns not him, but Ed Miliband. The biggest mistake that Balls admits to – not even in that chapter – is failing to be more “forceful” in a crucial conversation with Gordon Brown. There are exceptions, such as Harriet Harman’s A Woman’s Work, but in the main memoirs offer very little. If you want to get a sense of what something was really like, read a diary.
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