If journalism is the rough first draft of history, what are we to make of the rough first draft of journalism?

From 1969 until his death in 2003, Hugo Young, the impeccably liberal political columnist for The Sunday Times and then The Guardian, wrote up private notes of his meetings with the key players from all sides of British politics.

The results, collected in this volume, remind us of how transient politics is — who now remembers Sir Brandon Rhys Williams, Norman Atkinson or the National Industrial Relations Council? — but also how some things never go away: in 1969-70 immigration (“race”) and Europe (“the Common Market”) dominate many of Young’s conversations.

This all makes for an interesting stroll through 30 years of current affairs, and there are occasional fascinating snippets of gossip, but the gaps can be frustrating: there is little on Margaret Thatcher’s rise — or fall — or on John Major’s Black Wednesday. Young also focuses tightly on domestic politics — there is not much on the fall of the Berlin Wall, or even the Falklands. He seems most at home with a certain type of “wet” leftward-leaning Tory: Chris Patten, William Waldegrave, Douglas Hurd are frequent sources, but their conversations rarely rise above tactics and political infighting to examine the value of a decision or a policy.

These are, of course, contemporaneous dispatches from the front line, so it is instructive, if unfair, to see what he got wrong and right. He thinks that Ken Livingstone will lead the Labour Party and that Thatcher’s premiership will falter unless Ted Heath joins her Cabinet, and is impressed by Gordon Brown but misses the rise of Tony Blair.

It is true — and again unfair — that Young rarely departs from conventional wisdom: but for three decades his job was precisely to shape that conventional wisdom. For historians, biographers and political junkies this is a pudding stuffed full of plums waiting to be pulled out; general readers might find a less rough, later draft of history more useful.

The Hugo Young Papers: A Journalist’s Notes from the Heart of Politics edited by Ion Trewin (Penguin, £14.99; Buy this book; 834pp)

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