Ever the diplomat: Sir Malcolm Rifkind’s autobiography ‘Power and Pragmatism’

After a few lean years, it seems to be boom time again for political memoirs. David Cameron is taking a gap year to write his recollections, while his erstwhile director of communications, Craig Oliver, is working on an account of how the EU referendum was lost. Much is expected from former chancellor Ken Clarke, who has received a £430,000 advance for a book due later this year. And the backlog of the Blair era is still being cleared: Alastair Campbell is publishing four new volumes of his diaries in October, while Alan Johnson has written the third volume of his more literary tale.

To this mix comes Power and Pragmatism, the autobiography of Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who has the rare distinction of having served as a minister for 18 consecutive years, finishing up as foreign secretary in the 1990s.

Here is a man who occasionally defied Margaret Thatcher, and who helped to define Britain’s role in the world at the end of the cold war. “Diplomacy was fashionable and the Foreign Office was in its element,” he writes of trying to enable dialogue between Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Sir Malcolm has good credentials as a memoirist. A trained advocate, he is an amusing speaker and thoughtful politician. We also know that he is capable of unguarded honesty: when an MP, he was caught in a journalistic sting, boasting, “You’d be surprised by how much free time I have.” Last month he was unsuspectingly recorded during the Conservative party leadership election saying, “I don’t mind who wins as long as [Michael] Gove comes third.”

And yet, if recent events have convinced you that life in politics must be fascinating, this is the book to make you reconsider. Power and Pragmatism is as revealing as a Victorian duffel coat — and probably equally useful on a summer holiday. Its main purpose may be to offer lessons to those currently writing their own memoirs.

Lesson one: be selective. There may be readers interested in the fact that Sir Malcolm briefly had a beard when he was 19, regrets not seeing more of his friends David and Lizzie, and was recently given a very good bottle of malt whisky with the SAS insignia. But this reviewer was not one of them.

Lesson two: feign modesty. Sentences such as, “I had serious business to do and, by common consent, I was doing it competently and with some flair”, conjure up images of a politician rewatching his own speeches on the BBC’s Parliament channel.

Third: have something to say. Sir Malcolm certainly has a few nice lines. He got on so well with Al Gore that, during their first meeting, the then US vice-president just handed over the talking points prepared by his staff. A former chair of the intelligence and security committee, Sir Malcolm suggests that British people are relaxed about internet surveillance because their “historic memory” is Bletchley Park, not the Stasi.

But the book is curiously lacking in suspense, introspection or revelation. Much diplomacy comes across as souped-up sightseeing. Perhaps that is the point. “A Foreign Secretary is always caught by a cruel dilemma — hovering between the cliché and the indiscretion,” Sir Malcolm quotes another one-time holder of the role, Harold Macmillan, as having said. “He is either dull or dangerous.”

Better a courteous statesman like Sir Malcolm than a loose-lipped entertainer like the newly appointed Boris Johnson, some would argue.

Even in those terms, however, there is something unsatisfactory about Sir Malcolm’s account. “What should be Britain’s relationship with the rest of Europe and the wider world?” he asks in the introduction. The answer never arrives.

‘Power and Pragmatism’ is as revealing as a Victorian duffel coat — and probably equally useful on a summer holiday

For example, as a centrist Conservative, Sir Malcolm has an almost unique record on military intervention, having overseen the British presence in Bosnia; opposed bombing Slobodan Milosevic over Kosovo; been sceptical but ultimately in favour of the Iraq war; and more recently an advocate of bombing the Assad regime in Syria. These stances are not reconciled.

Nor is there a central success on which to hang the book. Sir Malcolm was involved in negotiating with Argentina over the Falklands, implementing the poll tax in Scotland, and overseeing the west’s policy towards Bosnia. None of these ended gloriously, nor do they, in Sir Malcolm’s case, give rise to mea culpas; two decades on, they are, in any event, rather stale.

Towards the end of Power and Pragmatism, Sir Malcolm takes issue with Enoch Powell’s claim that all political lives end in failure. “There certainly is disappointment and sadness when those who have been fortunate in achieving their goals realise that the glory days are behind them. But a sense of failure only exists when you were unable to realise your early hopes and aspirations,” he says.

David Cameron’s career may have ended in failure with the referendum result. But Margaret Thatcher’s didn’t, despite her ousting, Sir Malcolm argues. For his part, he aspired to be foreign secretary, and he succeeded.

That point is persuasive, and yet not worth waiting 447 pages for. Even if all political lives do not end in failure, some political memoirs do.

Power and Pragmatism: The Memoirs of Malcolm Rifkind, by Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Biteback, RRP£25, 480 pages

Henry Mance is an FT political correspondent