The sheer heaviness of my agenda has obliged me to cheat again at the blogging game. Over the past two weeks I have composed a number of posts, some on paper, some only mentally, but I simply haven’t had the time to post them until now. I wonder how people do it. On which score, I was happy recently to get back in touch with Iain Dale. He is an extraordinarily prolific blogger. He’s also a complete politics junkie, and that’s how I know him. He used to run the best-ever politics-concentrated bookshop that has ever existed, Politicos. For as long as it did exist, I was unable to visit London without also visiting Politicos, a delightfully rambling shop where you could also buy political momentos, posters, manifestos, etc, as well as collector’s items of, for example, the Nuffield General Election studies series. It was an Aladdin’s cave for politics anoraks and it had so much more character and atmosphere than, say, Foyle’s politics section. The London launch of my Kinnock was held there, thanks to Iain. Charles Clarke, currently lying fallow (in political terms), gave my all-time favourite description of the biography on that occasion. He said it was ‘an important book because it shows why politics matters.’ I still mourn the disappearance of Politicos. Iain and I would certainly not see eye-to-eye on many political issues, but on that particular issue we are surely in complete agreement; politics matters. And that is reason enough to visit Iain’s blog here.
Leave a Reply