A long time after its first publication, I used two recent transatlantic flights to read The End of the Party, Andrew Rawnsley's detailed and definitive account of the UK's New Labour government from 2001. It's a 700-plus page tome, including extensive notes about the author's sources. So although some of the material was disputed by this or that protagonist at the time of publication, it convinces me of its accuracy and thoroughness.

That makes two aspects of the book of particular interest for the purposes of this blog. One is the account of the government's response to the onset of the financial crisis. The detail is enticing anyway – who spoke to whom, the delivery of midnight curries to Downing Street, the casual way two of Britain's biggest banks were merged following a cocktail party chat between the PM and the Lloyd's TSB chairman, Victor Blank. Rawnsley shares the universal consensus that the immediate response to the imminent collapse of the banking system, in the UK and globally, was Gordon Brown's finest hour, and that his decisiveness saved the economy from the catastrophic consequences of extensive banking failure.

Also extraordinary is the immediate and incomprehensible reaction of the bankers, namely that none of it was their fault, and by the way it was essential that they continue to pay large bonuses or they wouldn't be able to attract the 'talent' they needed to compete and ensure financial services remained such a  successful, wealth-creating sector. Once the immediate crisis was over, Gordon Brown's notorious indecisiveness kicked in, and the opportunity to blow a large raspberry at the bankers was missed. (p608). We're still waiting for the new government and its Banking Commission to take effective action to curtail the political power of the banking industry, and the longer it takes, the less decisive any action is likely to be.

Which takes me on to a second interesting theme of this book, which is the difficulty of governing in complex modern societies in the context of a rabidly partisan press lacking respect for detail or even truth, and now the ur-populism of online news and comment. It's almost impossible for any government to get anything done. Even if the media shoals are navigated in order to make something politically possible, those affected by any decision will retreat to legal manoeuvres to prevent change. The spin doctors and the lawyers have great power, but they're not in control either.

Given the urgent need to tackle the banking sector, this leads me to conclude that neither legislation nor regulation will be very effective. One much-overlooked weakness of the system is the governance of banks. I'm very taken with the work of Michael Pirson at Fordham and Harvard Universities and Shann Turnbull of HBS and the International Institute for Self-Governance, who have written a number of papers about the failings of unitary boards and the need for supervisory boards to create within the banking system something similar to the checks and balances we think are important in political system. It's an intriguing idea.

Anyway, The End of the Party is a true cautionary tale about the challenges of modern government in general as well as a gripping account of the specific downfall of the New Labour project.