Thomas Jones writes:

The in every way anonymous narrator of The Ghost – he has no name, and not much of a life – has been hired to write the autobiography of Britain’s recently retired former prime minister. The secretarial sidekick to the powerful, from Tiro to Bernard Ingham, is a role Harris has long been interested in; few people are better placed to ponder the question of how this particular man came to occupy that position of power: ‘Who was he,’ the narrator of The Ghost asks himself, ‘this happy-go-lucky, girl-chasing, politically allergic would-be actor? What suddenly turned him into a party activist?’ Harris was a political journalist before he took up writing bestsellers, working on both Newsnight and Panorama, and then from 1987 as political editor of the Observer. During the 1980s he wrote non-fiction books on such subjects as chemical and biological weapons (with Jeremy Paxman), the Falklands War, Neil Kinnock, the Hitler Diaries and Bernard Ingham. A good friend of Peter Mandelson’s, he has long been close to the inner circles of New Labour.

(LRB 15 November 2007)

Hutchinson | hardback |ISBN: 9780091796266