The Heart Beats on the Left

'It is remarkable how much the key personalities in left-of-centre British and German politics seem to despise each other. For Cook hating Mandelson hating Mowlam hating Brown hating everyone, substitute Scharping, Vogel, Schröder and Lafontaine. Just as policy disagreements helped bring an end to the last two right-of-centre governments in Britain and Germany, Lafontaine's book makes clear, however unintentionally, that it is the abundance of personality clashes that will do the same for the current administrations in both countries. Michael Portillo once said that the Major Cabinet was a Cabinet of chums: on a personal level they actually rather liked each other. The Blair and Schröder cabinets are like vipers' nests. Both may meet sticky ends.

'He complains bitterly of the difficulty of governing with four conflicting centres of power - the party executive, the chancellor's office, the parliamentary party and the upper house. Lafontaine wanted complete control of all of them, but ended up with nothing. His experience should serve as a warning for every new Labour cabinet minister' Iain Dale, New Statesman

'A revealing account of his experiences in the lead-up to and the aftermath of the Red-Green coalition of 1998 ... Lafontaine was then, as he is now in his retrospective account, uncompromising in his commitment to what he sees as the core values of the Left. In the preface to this English translation, in a message directed explicitly at British readers, he argues that "the only chance that social democrats have of winning political majorities is by representing the interests of workers, the unemployed and pensioners".' London Review of Books

'Oskar Lafontaine's latest book presents his resignation from Gerhard Schroeder's government as a case study illustrating the fault lines within European Social Democracy ... the resignation issue was the abandonment of social democracy, in other words. This is itself makes the book worth reading, restoring one's faith in the politics of principle.' Red Pepper

'There is no intrinsic harm in standing out against prevailing orthodoxies: on the contrary, it can be an uncomfortable but brave position. On many of the above issues, at least until one reads this book, it is easy to sympathise with little Oskar, manfully beating his drum for what he claimed to believe in.' German Politics