Dirty Politics, Dirty Times: My Fight with Wapping and New Labour [Paperback]

This is Lord Ashcroft's readable and interesting autobiography, which concentrates on his account of the attacks on his reputation by a combination of New Labour spin-doctors seeking to damage the Conservative Party and Times Newspaper journalists seeking to create a story.

One of the worst legacies of the last fifteen years or so has been the extent that British politics and public life has become dominated by the tactics of personal destruction. Too many politicians on the left, right, and centre of the political spectrum have used attacks on the personal integrity of people who disagree with them or who are their rivals for office as a routine political tactic.

The New Labour leadership have probably been the worst offenders from even before they were running the country, but they are far from being the only ones, and this book sheds an interesting light on how much some parts of the press have to answer for.

Lord Michael Ashcroft is a self-made billionaire who has a strong involvement in politics both in Britain and Belize where he has business interests and spends a lot of his time. During the main timeframe of the book he was Treasurer of the Conservative Party. He was giving the party a large amount of his time, and sums of money which would be considerable to most people but which to him were almost certainly worth much less than the time.

From 1999 to 2001 Labour spin doctors, and the Times Newspaper, launched a strong attack on Michael Ashcroft's integrity. Eventually most of the charges made against him were either disproved or withdrawn. In a court case which Ashcroft brought against the government, he secured an apology, an admission that the government had leaked to the media documents containing unflattering statements about him which were "without foundation," and payment by the government of his costs.

Obviously, this book gives one side of the story rather than an impartial account. Anyone interested in reading the other side should not have too much difficulty finding it from an archive search on the Times Newspapers website.

Lord Ashcroft argues that a great many unfounded accusations were made against him. The most serious accusation in the book is that the British government tried to put pressure on the government of Belize to revoke financial agreements with companies owned by Michael Ashcroft by threatening not to include Belize in a programme of thrid world debt relief. In otherwords, trying to hold a small, poor country to ransom as part of a vendetta against a political opponent.

Some readers will find this book entirely convincing: others may not. But even those readers who don't come away from the book with a positive view of Michael Ashcroft can and should learn two important things from it.

The first of these, and the most frightening aspect of the book is this. Ashcroft is one of the richest and most powerful men in the world. Whether you like him or not, and whether you believe his side of the story or not, he is obviously also a very strong and determined character. But the book demonstrates convincingly that to clear his name he had to dig deep into his personal reseves of courage and determination, and use resources which would not be available to most people. He was able to win the battle, and is now Lord Ashcroft because he did get the peerage which part of the attack against him was intended to block.

However, you wonder how many people, if subjected to the kind of attack which he came under, would have been able to clear their names. As we have more recently seen, a number of people on the other side of the political divide who are nearly as rich as Ashcroft have been unable to fully repair serious damage to their reputations following the "loans for peerages" affair.

Ironically, since "Dirty Politics, Dirty Times" came out, the New Labour attack on Ashcroft described in the book has rebounded against themselves in a big way. The same basic argument they brought against Ashcroft - that a rich man who gives a lot of money to a political party must be doing so to buy favours - has been applied to their own donors. Hence the "loans for peerages" criminal investigation during which both Lord Levy, a close associate of Tony Blair who is Lord Ashcroft's closest equivalent on the Labour side, and a very senior Downing Street official, were been arrested. What goes around comes around.

Even though I cordially detest New Labour, I suspect that at least some of the people caught up in the "loans for peerages" scandal are probably innocent of wrongdoing but that they will still be damaged by association with Blair and Levy and by the culture of suspicion which New Labour created to attack Michael Ashcroft but which has now come back to hurt them in turn. Perhaps that is the most important lesson which this book illustrates.