Finest and Darkest Hours, by Kevin Jefferys

A history of Britain - minus the boring bits

Here's a bright idea for a book: a history of postwar Britain with all the boring bits left out, like one of those CDs of opera highlights or Match of the Day (Kevin Jefferys likes football analogies) with all the goals but no build-up. Of course, this is unfair. But all these stories have been told so many times that little is left to add. Jefferys trawls over familiar ground with clarity and balance, but cannot dispel the impression that it is all a bit redundant.

His argument is that history is determined by Harold Macmillan-type "events", not by deep currents. But this is contradicted by the quotation from Christopher Booker's The Neophiliacs which provides an epigraph: "In the life of any government, however safe its majority, there comes a moment when the social movements of which it had once been the expression turn inexorably against it... After that, every mistake it makes becomes magnified."

Booker wrote that in 1969, and the last 30 years have underlined its truth. Almost all of Jefferys' 12 key episodes feature precisely that moment from which a government never recovered. Thus we have the obvious shipwrecks which overcame Anthony Eden (Suez), Harold Macmillan (Profumo), Ted Heath (three-day week) and Jim Callaghan (Winter of Discontent); but also the more delayed time-bombs which fatally undermined Clem Attlee (Nye Bevan's resignation) and John Major ("Black Wednesday" in 1992).

Even two of the high points illustrate the same theme. Churchill's triumph in 1940 was, from another angle, the fall of Chamberlain; while the moment in 1942 when victory at Alamein was swiftly followed by the Beveridge Report marked the beginning of the end not only of the war, but of Churchill. The one episode which has nothing to do with the fall of a government is Mrs Thatcher's improbable apotheosis in the Falklands.

The most doubtful chapter is the last, highlighting how John Smith's death delivered the Labour Party to Tony Blair. Jefferys usefully recalls the unprecedented national mourning – a rehearsal for Diana? – which suddenly saw Labour recognised as the inevitable next government. But Major's fate had already been sealed by Black Wednesday. Smith's death was nobody's finest or darkest hour.

It is hard to quarrel with the choice of dramatic moments, though one could make a case for several more: the 1944 Education Act, the founding of the NHS, the 1971 Common Market debate, the 1984-85 miners' strike... But why write the book at all? It is difficult to escape the suspicion that this is a volume born of the pressure on academics to keep publishing titles to boost university productivity figures. That pressure discourages laborious original scholarship in favour of quick potboilers. This is a good potboiler, but still a potboiler.

The concluding volume of the reviewer's biography of Margaret Thatcher will be published next year