Hatchet Job of the Day

Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times on Screwing Up, the memoirs of scandal-hit Lib Dem MP, Mark Oaten:

…instead of telling us what happened with the rent boy he tells us all about his family holiday in Austria when he went skiing and, in the end, had a great time, and a later excursion to Bangkok that he really, really enjoyed, even though the country was in the middle of a military coup. In the political autobiography of, say, Bismarck or Churchill or even Paddy Ashdown, this omission wouldn’t matter much because there would be other stuff, important affairs of state and so on, to hold our interest. But this isn’t the autobiography of Bismarck — it’s the autobiography of Mark Oaten and could quite usefully have been subtitled “Milly Molly Mandy Goes to Westminster”, given the utter paucity of revelation and insight we are afforded.

More reviews to come.