An unauthorised biography of Jeremy Corbyn is out. According to Wikpedia the author Tom Bower "is a British writer known for his investigative journalism and for his unauthorized biographies, often of business tycoons and newspaper proprietors. His books include unauthorised biographies of Robert Maxwell, Mohamed Al-Fayed, Conrad Black, and Richard Branson" and his book "Broken Vows – Tony Blair: The Tragedy of Power, was serialised in the Daily Mail and published in March 2016". He has apparently been sued unsuccessfully by several of his subjects.

The Sunday Times has reviewed the book.

Review: Dangerous Hero: Corbyn’s Ruthless Plot for Power by Tom Bower — portrait of a monomaniac

This is one of the most depressing books I have ever read. It is a forensically detailed portrait of a man with no inner life, a monomaniac suffused with an overwhelming sense of his own righteousness, a private schoolboy who failed one A-level and got two Es in the others, a polytechnic dropout whose first wife never knew him to read a book.

It is the story of a man who does not appear to have gone to the cinema or listened to music, takes no interest in art or fashion and refused to visit Vienna’s magnificent Schönbrunn Palace because it was “royal”. It tells how he bitterly opposed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, deeply regretted the fall of the Berlin Wall and praised the men who attacked New York on September 11, 2001, for showing an “enormous amount of skill”. In some parallel universe, this man would currently be living in well-deserved obscurity. In reality, Jeremy Corbyn is the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition and the bookmakers’ favourite to become our next prime minister.

For the veteran biographer Tom Bower, whose previous subjects include Mohamed al-Fayed, Richard Branson, Simon Cowell, Tony Blair and Prince Charles, Corbyn is the easiest target imaginable. The details of his life are well known. Born in 1949, the son of a skilled engineer and a maths teacher, he was brought up in a large 17th-century farmhouse in Shropshire called Yew Tree Manor. At school he was a loner and an underachiever, so lazy that his headmaster told him: “You’ll never make anything of your life.”

A sullen teenager who never grew up, Corbyn did voluntary service as a teacher in Jamaica. He enrolled at North London Polytechnic, reading “trade union studies”, but found the work too hard and dropped out. He became a classic mid-1970s bedsit activist, on the far-left fringe of the Labour Party. If he had been more intelligent, he would probably have called himself a Trotskyist. But Bower recounts that when a friend lent him Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, Corbyn returned it unread. Indeed, probably the most shocking fact in this biography is that so many of his former intimates believe he has never read a book.

As Bower tells it, Corbyn’s political longevity since he became MP for Islington North in 1983 is really a reflection of his ignorance and fanaticism. A normal person would have lost interest and found something better to do, but his first two wives both complained that he was interested in nothing but politics. His first wife, Jane Chapman, reports that the only time he seemed to enjoy himself was when he sat on the floor with fellow hard-left activists, singing pro-IRA songs.

His second wife, Claudia Bracchitta, became infuriated by his financial mismanagement, absent parenting and ideological dogma, which meant that he banned her from hiring a cleaner. Even when she was giving birth to their first child, all he could think about was distributing a leaflet about Northern Ireland.

Bower has some fun with the spectacle of Corbyn the lothario, recounting that he had flings with an eclectic variety of left-wing groupies, among them the young Diane Abbott. In one bizarre moment, Corbyn arranged to have some associates find the naked Abbott lying on his bed, perhaps because he was so proud of having slept with a black woman. As a Scottish MP once remarked to George Galloway, Corbyn was so obsessed with seeming anti-racist that “he would black up if he could”.

How did such a man, with not a single political achievement to his name, come to succeed Ed Miliband as Labour leader in 2015? Bower’s narrative adds nothing to the usual explanation that, thanks in part to Tony Blair, the party had become a hollow shell, ripe for takeover by the hard left. What is particularly depressing, though, is to read how quickly the atmosphere of Corbyn’s new party degenerated into what Bower calls a culture of “sexism, racism and victimhood”. In particular, it is clear from this account that the repellent anti-semitism that has now seeped into the party’s culture is not an aberration, but reflects Corbyn’s thinking for the past four decades.

As far back as 1984, he was closely involved with activists who wanted to “eradicate Zionism”, and Corbyn himself wanted to enable student unions to expel Jewish groups. The rest is well known. “They don’t want to study history,” Corbyn infamously said of British “Zionists”, by which he manifestly meant “Jews”, “and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, [they] don’t understand English irony either.” If he had said those words in 1973 over a few beers with his fellow bedsit radicals, that would be one thing. In fact, he said them to a Palestinian group allied to Hamas, six years ago. No wonder, then, that a Jewish MP such as Luciana Berger can no longer stand to be in the same party.

Since none of this is a secret, Bower’s biography piles up what we already knew or suspected, with a topping of gossip from former friends and colleagues who became exasperated by Corbyn’s laziness, self-absorption and utter lack of a cultural hinterland. But nobody who reads this book can be in any doubt that if he became prime minister, he would comfortably be the most indolent, least articulate and least intelligent holder of the office in history. Bower calls him “dangerous”, and indeed he is. But if he won, the real danger would come from the people behind him, notably the far more ruthless and intelligent John McDonnell.

Precisely because his book is so unremittingly negative, though, Bower never makes sense of the millenarian expectation among Corbyn’s young supporters, who have elevated him into a kind of prophet. Instead there is far too much padding about Britain’s recent political history. To pick a small but tellingly inaccurate example, Bower gives a potted account of the 1978-9 winter of discontent, for which he blames the union leader Jack Jones — despite the fact that Jones had already retired, and spent his final years trying to restrain the militants. All this feels superfluous. Yet Bower never really unpicks precisely why so many people, despite everything, continue to support such a joyless, limited and dogmatic man.

Dominic Sandbrook has been shortlisted for the National Press Awards’ critic of the year

Wm Collins £20 pp400

I would have no worries about this becoming the coffee table 'must have' of the year...but you may well see it in the 'pound bin' at a discount store near you...soon...

Interesting - why not tell us why you might think that?

The books he was lent might not have been unread.
If someone lends me a book I take it to be polite, flick through to see if I like It and then get my own copy to read, because I like to break the spines, slosh soup on them and drop them into the jacuzzi.

Bower works for a firm that hacks the phone of a murdered child.

Bower accused one of his critics of being a "self hating Jew".

The notion anyone would be interested in his "biography" of Corbyn is bizarre.

hedda wrote:
Bower accused one of his critics of being a "self hating Jew".
According to Wikipedia, his parents were Jewish (called Bauer).

Jo wrote:
hedda wrote:
Bower accused one of his critics of being a "self hating Jew".
According to Wikipedia, his parents were Jewish (called Bauer).

indeed so he knows what a vile & cruel demeaning antisemitic attack it is. Disgusting man.

But really..who would want to read a biog of Corbyn? Not even his fans I would have thought.

There's not a lot to tell. He's been an MP most of his life on the back bench.

Very uninteresting.

The book is a nasty hatchet job but ..those who hate Corbyn wouldn't want to read it either.

No wonder the Mail serialized it but everyone knows they hate Corbyn so it's just a bizarre exercise and presumably a costly one with no discernible benefit..

Reeks of desperation.