Michael White's choice

Does Claire Tomalin's new biography Dickens (Viking, £30) count as a political book? Dickens was very political (he hated politicians), so I think it does. And Robert Harris's (he's not keen on most of them either) latest psychological thriller, The Fear Index (Hutchinson, £18.99), tells of the run-up to the great bank crash of 2008. Less racy is Alistair Darling's Back From the Brink: 1,000 Days at Number 11 (Atlantic, £19.99), a characteristically solid account of the crash  the banking system's and his own with Gordon Brown  written by a politician whose rare lack of ego was perfectly suited to the chancellorship he inherited just before the derivatives hit the fan in 2007.

Some will find Julian Assange  The Unauthorised Biography (Canongate, £20), ghosted by Andrew O'Hagan, a compelling read, not least English-speaking Swedes. The Importance of Being Awkward (Birlinn, £25) is the extraordinary memoirs of  who else?  the Old Etonian serial rebel, Tam Dalyell. String-pulling, name-dropping, opinionated in every line, an innocence bolstered by immense self-confidence, this is a maddening book, but also a riveting read, detailing Dalyell's many campaigns, often lonely, often lasting for decades, sometimes triumphantly vindicated years later. Scottish devolution, which he vigorously opposed: right or wrong? Kosovo, Iraq, the Falklands, Afghanistan, Libya, he opposed those interventions too. An admirable career.

Ken Livingstone would probably approve of Dalyell, though his own gargantuan autobiography, You Can't Say That (Faber, £25), is "not for the faint-hearted," so Seumas Milne advised in his Guardian review. But the Peter Pan of City Hall does have a 30-year record in public life to defend and attack, which is more than can be said for the subjects of key political biographies in 2011. Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre's Ed: The Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader (Biteback, £17.99) is an admiring quickie; Sonia Purnell's Just Boris: The Irresistible Rise of a Political Celebrity (Aurum, £20) perhaps conveys more than it intends in the title. An anti-European, libertarian tub-thumper who privately prefers the company of urbane metropolitan moderates, he may find he has to work harder to stay in office as recession deepens.

Purnell's volume is also up against Andrew Gimson's elegant Boris: The Rise of Boris Johnson, soon to be updated and reissued, a melancholy but hilarious book about a boisterous career that evokes a character from Evelyn Waugh). Nick Clegg: The Biography by Chris Bowers (Biteback, £17.99) is unlikely to provide as much fun to loyal Lib Dem activists who buy it for each other's Christmas stockings. Opinion polls suggest we might have to wait a while for the 10th reprinting.

The saintly Peter Riddell published an unfashionable book this year, In Defence of Politicians (In Spite of Themselves) (Biteback, £9.99), which is fair-minded and well-informed. Most politicians are honest and hard-working in a trade which, far from being triumphalist, has lost its nerve in the face of fearful events that cannot be controlled and what Riddell calls "the rise of the ranters" in Fleet Street and the internet. "Thought-provoking" is as honest as I dare be without damaging sales.

What does that leave us with to end on an upbeat note? The Archbishop of Canterbury, an attractively unworldly intellectual in so many ways, is telling friends this Christmas that they might enjoy John Butler's The Red Dean of Canterbury (Scala, £16.95), which may not strike younger readers as a very political book either. Older ones will vividly recall how Hewlett Johnson was a turbulent cleric, as tormented by the tabloids as Mayor Livingstone. Why so? For decades he was a champion of Stalin and remained one long after wartime solidarity and the repression in eastern Europe had tempered wider enthusiasm. Johnson even defended the 1956 invasion of Hungary, a turning point for many. Definitely a niche market in north London for this one.

Admirers of Hewlett may regard Chris Mullin with some suspicion: a former Tribune editor and campaigning journalist (the Birmingham Six, etc), he became an MP in a less wayward version of the Dalyell model, briefly and unhappily (mostly) a minister under Tony Blair, whom he liked despite being able to see through him. In one volume of Mullin's diaries, the third of which was published this year (A Walk-On Part, Profile, £20), Blair is still referred to by the author as "The Man". The Man sacked him as Africa minister in 2005 but Mullin is never unhappy on the backbenches for long. Like Riddell he sees politics as an honourable trade (in spite of himself). Perceptive, witty, humane, indignant and self-lacerating by turn, Mullin has the qualities of all enduring diarists, though he lacks the frustrated ambition which often makes a Pepys or an Alan Clark so unintentionally funny. The play of the books has just arrived in London. See it if you can. Or read the book.

Rafael Behr's choice

At some point at the end of the last century it became normal to talk about politicians having brands. Previously they had reputations. Is there a difference? Perhaps, since a brand is tested in the marketplace, with success measured purely in terms of who is buying today. Reputation can be enhanced or destroyed by the longer judgment of history.

The distinction is a central theme, although never explicitly stated, in The Unfinished Revolution (Abacus £16.99) by the late Philip Gould. (The author died in November.) It is an updated edition of an account first published in 1998 of the creation of New Labour by the man whose forensic study of opinion polls was instrumental in diagnosing what was wrong with the "old" version. No book published this year contains more insight into modern politics. It is an antidote to the lazy critique of Tony Blair's project as a cynical exercise in stealing Conservative clothing. Gould makes a persuasive case that New Labour was a sincere vocation to reunite a party with voters so as better to represent them in government. Gould might have deployed the techniques of modern marketing, but he looked beyond the problems of Labour's brand to the underlying political mistake  the failure actually to listen to what the public was saying  that risked destroying its reputation as a party that cared.

So where did it all go wrong? Plenty of answers to that question are contained in the third volume of The Alastair Campbell Diaries (Hutchinson £25), which are as compelling and as demoralising as might be expected from a former tabloid polemicist's account of life as Blair's chief spin doctor. Two essential flaws show up in the way New Labour wielded power. First, there was a tendency to mistake communication of a message for the implementation of a policy. Second, the chancellor was determined to supplant the prime minister and the prime minister lacked the means or the will to stop him. Blair comes across as strangely diffident in the face of Gordon Brown's machinations and tantrums. He seems to have felt some guilt when faced with Brown's claim to have been cheated of a prime ministerial birthright, even though everyone else in No 10 thought it delusional.

The consoling hope was that the flaws in Brown's temperament were caused by frustration that would dissipate once he got into No 10. They didn't, as is clear from Back from the Brink (Atlantic £19.99), Alistair Darling's memoirs of serving as Brown's chancellor. The imperative of dealing with the worst financial crisis in living memory did not stop the prime minister treating his colleague and former friend with histrionic aggression. He ran, Darling says, a "brutal regime", reinforced by a gang of advisers who failed to confront him over his destructive behaviour.

Somewhere in that gang lurked one Edward Miliband. But he could never be mistaken for a thug. It simply isn't his style, as documented in Ed (Biteback £17.99), Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre's biography of Miliband. Inevitably, when the book was published, newspapers filleted it for stories about poisoned relations between the man who became Labour leader and David, the older brother he beat to the job. The book narrates that competition in detail, while avoiding wild psychoanalytic speculation. Awkwardly for Miliband, however, the perception of fratricide stuck in many voters' minds before he had a chance to shape a public image on his own terms.

If Miliband ever worries about his brand, he can find comfort in the fact it could not be worse than Nick Clegg's. In last year's televised election debates the Liberal Democrat leader achieved the closest thing politicians get to stardom without dancing for charity. He was cheered as a fresh face representing a new kind of politics. He then went into coalition with the Conservatives, reneged on a signed campaign pledge, and became the emblem of everything people hated about the usual kind of politics. Is the damage irreversible? Can a solid reputation be built from a flimsy brand? This is the vital question for the Lib Dems but it is handled timidly in Chris Bowers's biography, titled simply Nick Clegg (Biteback £17.99). It is a mostly banal precis of the Lib Dem leader's story so far.

Not so Just Boris (Aurum £20), Sonia Purnell's colourful biography of the mayor of London (more of a political celebrity than Clegg will ever be). Purnell decodes Johnson's complex personality, hoping to explain how a man so famously disorganised and prone to sexual and political misdemeanour has scaled the heights of public life. The answer is a cocktail of charisma, intelligence and pathological self-belief. It is a potent formula but one that comes across as ultimately toxic and likely to prevent the man from fulfilling his ambition, always suspected but never admitted, of one day becoming prime minister.

A similar combination of traits (albeit manifest in very different politics) comes across in the autobiography of Boris's arch rival, Ken Livingstone, You Can't Say That (Faber £25). Ken is the only other British politician whose first name is also a brand. He is more generous to himself than any other author would be, and even when trying to be modest, the self-regard still pokes through. The book is most engaging as social history, describing an austere childhood in 1950s London. There is a turning point at the end of the 60s described, with unintentional comedy, as the moment his life was "consumed with an exhilarating round of committee meetings". By the end of the 70s, his worldview feels limited to the internal processes of the Labour party as it prepares for a long journey away from the electorate.

The party's final lap in the wilderness and return to power provide the backdrop for A Walk-On Part (Profile £25), Chris Mullin's diaries as an MP, covering the period 1994-99. Mullin's previously published journals of the thankless life of a junior minister (covering 2000-2007) have justly been celebrated as masterpieces of the genre. This prequel has the same vital ingredients: candour, brevity and wit. Here is a man who would surely laugh at the idea of politicians aspiring to have anything so facile as a brand  a healthy cynicism that probably limited his career but guarantees his reputation as a diarist.

Rafael Behr is chief political commentator for the New Statesman

 Which books about politics would you give?

Alistair Darling is a strange one. He was the chancellor who presided over the most catastrophic financial crash since the second world war and he was a senior member of the cabinet that subsequently took Labour to its second worst defeat since the first world war. Yet he emerged from the burnt-out wrecks of an economy and a party still commanding respect among his colleagues, his opponents and the media. This is partly because he is a decent, thoughtful, modest and essentially honest man  straight, at any rate, by the admittedly low standards that we expect of politicians. Those are qualities that shine out of this book. He is also regarded quite kindly because he is seen not so much as the villain of those calamities as their victim, a view he often takes himself in his account of the torrid thousand days that he spent at No 11.

It was his first misfortune to become chancellor just as the New Labour "economic miracle", which claimed to have replaced boom and bust with perpetual growth, was about to implode in the most spectacular crash since the 1930s. He writes compellingly about the market meltdown and ensuing recession, spicing the narrative with a droll wit and acidic observations about the "arrogant and stupid" bank chiefs. If this story has been told before, it is still informative to have the scary view from the edge of the precipice as Britain teeters on the brink of a complete collapse of its banks. On the critical night when the first rescue is being hammered out, he despairs of bankers who are still wrangling terms "as if they had weeks to seal the deal" when they were only hours away from shutting down the cash machines.

Why the crisis happened, and the risks of a repeat of it, are also the subject of Masters of Nothing. This stimulating book by two Tory MPs lays much of the blame on the irrational culture of the City for its recklessness and concludes with some thought-provoking recommendations for reform. For his part, Darling freely confesses that the tax revenues milked from the financial sector during the boom years left New Labour "blinded" to "ever greater risk-taking" in the City.

His second misfortune was to be chancellor when Gordon Brown was prime minister. On the face of it, they were a good pairing. Darling's personality is essentially placid, passive and self-deprecating. That could have been a good foil for the volatile, domineering and egotistical Brown. Darling was not a Blairite and he harboured no ambitions for the leadership. So Brown had no rational reason to have his paranoid tendencies aroused by his old friend. The two men, whose Scottish homes were just a few miles apart, had known each other for 20 years. Before they fell out, Maggie Darling would often babysit for the Browns. Yet her husband soon found that past loyalty and friendship were no protection from the dark side of the next-door neighbour. Brown replicated with his chancellor the horrendously dysfunctional relationship he had previously had with Tony Blair. A problem from the start was that Brown really wanted Ed Balls as chancellor. With characteristic charm, he said as much to Darling, who knew he was intended as "a stopgap appointment" having been told by Brown that he should not count on being at the Treasury for more than "just a year or so". Vicious spinning against his chancellor by "Gordon's attack dogs" became relentless after Darling told the truth that Britain was facing the worst economic prospects in 60 years. It culminated in Brown attempting to force out his chancellor: failing because Darling wouldn't budge and Brown was now too enfeebled to insist.

The Brown depicted here is a deeply unpleasant man. There are admirable qualities, and Darling acknowledges them, but they fail to redeem the ugly dimensions of his personality. Brown is the mafia boss of a "brutal regime". He is a cowardly capo, too, who gets his hatchet men to do his dirty work by briefing against members of the cabinet who have had the temerity to disagree with him. He is the hopelessly deluded prime minister in denial about the severity of the recession and incapable of grasping the economic and electoral imperative for Labour to present a credible plan for dealing with the deficit. No one in his inner cabal dares to tell him the truth: "Gordon was only told that which he wanted or could bear to hear." He is the self-pitying whiner who thinks the world is conspiring against him while "he seemed to have no conception of the effects of his sometimes appalling behaviour on those close to him, or the political damage his way of operating could cause".

The portrait of the Brown premiership as a combination of chaos and brutishness is already highly familiar from previous accounts. There is corroboration here rather than anything startlingly fresh. Coming from Darling, it nevertheless has sting, because the two men were once close. This is confirmation that Brown was incapable of forming stable and trusting relationships even with the most amenable of colleagues. Darling was famous among the rest of the cabinet for his stoicism. He writes: "My pain threshold is pretty high." Yet even this most even of men was "driven to breaking point" by Brown's abominable behaviour.

Some of us wrote when New Labour was still in office that the government was riven with intense and debilitating personal feuding and policy disputes, the most nasty of which revolved around Gordon Brown, and which became even more poisonous once he moved into No 10. The likes of Peter Mandelson and John Prescott denounced us as exaggerators, sensationalists or fabricators. I suppose it is too much to expect an apology now that the memoirists of the New Labour years have confirmed that the fear, the loathing and the psychological flaws were every bit as bad as we said.

Then there is the big question for the Labour party. Why did no one do anything? Why did Tony Blair, whose book makes clear that he viewed Brown as temperamentally unfit to be prime minister, not try to prevent his succession? Why, once it was beyond dispute that Brown was a terrible prime minister, did the cabinet not act? I tend to agree with Darling that Labour might have enjoyed a better fate at the last election "had we played our hand differently". So why did the cabinet not replace Brown with someone who might have saved Labour from defeat  or at least softened the scale of it?

Darling clearly would not have minded if someone else had wielded the dagger, but he would not do the deed himself, so he says, because of a "residual loyalty to him which I found impossible to overcome". Other members of that cabinet have offered a variety of different excuses for their paralysis. I could produce a complex analysis of the personal and political calculations that left Brown in place to lead Labour over the cliff. Perhaps, though, it really boils down to something much simpler: they were all too scared of him. Their party paid the price.

Andrew Rawnsley's The End of the Party is available in paperback (Penguin)

One of Gordon Brown's favourite jokes is that chancellors of the exchequer fall into two categories: those who fail and those who get out of the Treasury in time.

Alistair Darling did neither. He presided over the longest and deepest recession in Britain since the second world war, including the biggest one-year drop in activity since the early 1920s. And, having been dealt one of the duffest hands imaginable, he survived the run on Northern Rock, the enforced nationalisation of a good chunk of Britain's high-street banking network and incessant bad-mouthing, to be there when Brown departed from Downing Street five days after the 2010 general election.

Even so, Darling is a rarity in British politics; a chancellor whose reputation has improved with age. In part, that is due to his baleful legacy, a structurally weak economy that would be gripped by a systemic financial crisis within six weeks of him taking occupancy of 11 Downing Street. In part, it is that Brown has become the scapegoat for all the failings of the Labour government. But it also has something to do with the fact that Darling comes across as a thoroughly decent bloke doing his best in the worst of circumstances.

Unsurprisingly, that image is burnished in this memoir of Labour's Götterdämmerung, which is peppered with tales of the chancellor's best endeavours being thwarted by a paranoiac prime minister, an out-of-touch Bank of England governor and the antics of bankers intoxicated by money and power.

From the start, Darling suggests, he was only keeping the Treasury seat warm for Brown's protégé, Ed Balls, and had to put up with incessant meddling from his next-door neighbour as he prepared his budget statements. With some relish, Darling tells the story of his Guardian interview in the summer of 2008 which, entirely correctly, warned that the global economy was at risk of its most severe downturn in 60 years, but prompted behind-the-scenes attacks from Brown's camp.

"My fairly accurate prediction of what was to come economically might have been long forgotten but for the inept briefing machine at No 10", Darling notes. "For that I owe them thanks, which is something I am sure they never anticipated."

The sub-plot detailing Darling's strained relationship with Sir Mervyn King also makes compelling reading. It is clear from the book that the two fell out badly over the way to handle the credit crunch, with Darling becoming increasingly frustrated by what he saw as the governor's foot-dragging approach to providing financial support for the banking system. When King's first five-year term of office was drawing to an end, Darling only reappointed him because he could think of nobody better to do the job, hardly the most ringing of endorsements. A year later, King used his Mansion House speech to call for the break-up of Britain's banks into investment and retail arms, and for the job of policing the City to be handed to the Bank of England. Darling says that both were Conservative party policies, and that King's earlier warning that the Brown government had not set out a credible plan for public borrowing could be similarly characterised. "Mervyn was careful to cover his pronouncements with caveats, which usually went unreported, but even so he was coming perilously close to crossing a line between legitimate comment and entering the political fray."

It would be wrong though to see this book simply as a crude attempt to settle scores, however tempting that must have been. Instead, Darling sticks the stiletto into his victims with great deftness. His criticisms of Brown and King carry more weight because they are leavened with praise where he thinks it is due. During the period after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, Darling says it was Brown's force of personality and determination that ensured all the major countries signed up to bailing out the banks. Similarly, King did an "excellent job" in the build-up to the London G20 in April 2009, making sure other central bankers knew what they had to do to boost growth. The overall impression is of a chronicler at pains to be both fair and accurate.

Given Darling's reputation as a safe pair of hands, it is strange to find so many factual mistakes. The Doha round of trade talks began in 2001 not 2002. Alastair Campbell did not leave the Blair government in 2002; to have done so would have meant him quitting before the start of the Gulf war in 2003. The economy contracted by 4.9% in 2009, not 4.7%. The date when the Royal Bank of Scotland was on the brink of collapse shifts from October 7 2008 (correct) on page one to October 11 (incorrect) on page 12. Unless Darling is using a special Treasury arithmetic where each unit counts double, it is 6,000 miles from London to Cape Town, not 12,000.

These are silly errors which detract from what is otherwise a thoroughly readable, and often witty, account of what Darling calls his 1,000 days at Number 11. The inability to get the small things right inevitably creates doubt about whether the author is wrong about the big things as well, and it would be a mistake to see this account  however reasonable it seems  as the last word on Labour's dog days. The current slide of the economy towards double-dip recession suggests that Brown and Balls were right about the risks of switching from stimulus to austerity too soon. King's view that failure to get tough with the City makes a second financial crisis more likely may yet be vindicated. Darling rather glosses over his responsibility for the flawed system of City regulation that broke down completely during the financial crisis and never really satisfactorily explains why he didn't tell Brown, seriously weakened after the "election that never was" in the autumn of 2007, to get his tanks off the Treasury's lawn. Darling bottled up his resentment at the deplorable way he was treated and is now having his revenge in print. That makes Back from the Brink one heck of a good read.