Andy Beckett's Blog, page 27

Alex Calderwood: the cool hunter

Alex Calderwood had a knack for predicting a trend – from dance clubs to barbers' shops to a string of hipster hotels. Then, last autumn, he was found dead in his new London hangout, the Ace Hotel in Shoreditch. What happened?

The Ace Hotel in Shoreditch opened last September, but already it feels like a new sort of London institution. In the lobby, there is a long and busy shared table. Elegant library-style reading lights run down the middle; to either side there are two dozen plain wooden chairs. Most of them are occupied throughout the day by people with laptops – young, or youngish, and carefully dressed in casual clothes. Some are guests, some are not; yet none of the hotel staff seems to draw a distinction or try to move anybody on. Instead, for hours at a time, the people at the table type purposefully, make work phone calls and hold confidently public business meetings. The first time I visited, just before Christmas, two studiedly bearded men next to me were conceiving a website to sell bespoke T-shirts.

Occasionally, someone at the table orders a drink from the in-house cafe at the far end of the lobby, which offers "meticulously sourced" beans and looks like a cross between a cocktail bar and a science laboratory. Occasionally, someone steals a self-conscious glance at the other lobby inhabitants, or the comings and goings through the hotel's heavy, industrial-chic doors. The lobby itself is painted grey and sparsely furnished, but softly lit, and warmed all day by wafts of music from some perfectly crowdsourced hipster iPod. Somehow, the Ace seems cutting edge and homely at the same time: as its website puts it, "a friendly place, continually new".

Outside, the pleasures and opportunities of booming inner east London extend in all directions: Dalston's nightclubs to the north, Old Street's digital start-ups to the west, the City of London's financial honeypot to the south.

The 264-room hotel is largely the creation of Alex Calderwood, an American entrepreneur and self-styled "cultural engineer". Starting in Seattle in the 1980s, straight out of school, he constructed an idiosyncratic, hyperactive, ever-diversifying career, involving fashion design and retail, nightclubs, a barbers' shop chain, a record label, an advertising and marketing agency, an art book publisher and, most recently, an international chain of hotels that successfully overturned many of the rules of the hospitality trade. Before the London Ace, he had established hotels in Seattle, Portland, New York and Palm Springs, each starkly different in atmosphere and design, and therefore lacking the usual benefits of standardisation and economies of scale, yet each still trading and widely acclaimed.

Meanwhile, Calderwood's broader tastes and enthusiasms – vintage clothes and tattoo parlours, reclaimed furniture and buildings, a more relaxed service culture, army surplus and Americana, comfort food and graffiti art, fancy coffee and retro typography – helped redefine what many people think of as an appealing urban life. "Ace Hotel redesigned just about everything," declared the international design website Civilian last year. "[It] has become a design movement in itself." By last autumn, at 47, Calderwood was well on his way to becoming a legendary commodifier of modern pleasures: the hipster's Terence Conran.

But at 2.35pm on 14 November, a Thursday, the London Ambulance Service got a call from the Ace in Shoreditch. A man had collapsed at the hotel, reportedly in one of its immaculately arranged bedrooms. The first medic reached the man within seven minutes, but it was too late. Alex Calderwood was pronounced dead soon afterwards.

An inquest is scheduled to take place on Tuesday. In the meantime, speculation about the cause of his death suggests a heart attack; an aneurysm; alcohol poisoning; a drug overdose, accidental or suicidal. In 2011, Calderwood told the New York Times that he had recently been to rehab for a drinking problem: "You get to a certain age, and you get to a certain point, where you realise this is just, like, dragging me down. It's not fun any more. I'm not enjoying it... [Nowadays] I'm very proud of my sobriety." He told the paper he had been sober for five months.

Yet for Calderwood's oldest friends and colleagues, most of whom still form a tight circle in Seattle, and who have said little or nothing to the media since November, his death prompts more complicated feelings. "A lot of us are still not thinking, not talking to each other about it," says Caterina deCarlo, Calderwood's personal manager, who started working for him as a nightclub cloakroom assistant in 1998. Another longstanding colleague says, "There's a lot of shame around what we think happened. Well, we don't exactly know what happened. But we know that in his last year he didn't feel like he had anybody to talk to."

Ace was Calderwood's childhood nickname. He was born in Denver in 1966, and grew up near Seattle in Bellevue, a booming satellite city with long suburban waterfronts and views of distant mountains. His father had a construction business, his mother wrote a community news column for a local paper, and Calderwood was educated at an academically ambitious Catholic private school. There he showed a rare facility for moving between the rigid social tribes of American high school, while keeping something of himself in reserve.

But at home, relationships were sometimes trickier. Calderwood's parents had divorced when he was still a child. "Alex had a stepmother he didn't like, and his dad was working all the time," says Jared Lovejoy, another old friend. "He spent a lot of time alone."

After leaving school, instead of going to university, he made a new life in Seattle. In the mid-80s, it was a gritty, grey port city, but a prosperous past had left it full of handsome, under-used buildings. Calderwood was partly colour-blind – he couldn't distinguish reds from greens – but he was interested in fashion, and began working for a clothes shop called International News, decorating its showroom with unwanted desks and light fixtures from Boeing, the Seattle aircraft manufacturer. Quickly realising the appeal of old Americana, he moved into the vintage denim trade, tracking down forgotten stocks of jeans, selling them to the Japanese.

"When I first met him, he was preppy: crisp, short hair, plaid button-down shirts, Sperry Top-Sider boat shoes," Lovejoy says. "He was always so stiff. You couldn't really hug him." Calderwood told the American design magazine Surface last year, "I'm actually not a people person. I'm incredibly shy. I have a hard time going to public events, because I'm more inward. But I've learned through experience how to navigate that."

By the late 80s, Seattle itself was loosening up, its nightlife energised by the emergence of raw local grunge rock bands such as Nirvana. Soon afterwards, Calderwood diversified into music and nightclub promotion. He was living in the slightly seedy city centre, near most of the venues; he had eclectic tastes – British dance music as well as American rock – and his ability to move between tribes remained. He and Lovejoy were both gay, but neither felt overwhelmingly defined by their sexuality. They started putting on club nights that ignored sexual and musical boundaries, as some venues long had in bigger cities the pair had begun to visit, such as New York and London.

While Lovejoy was tattooed and long-haired and more naturally outgoing, Calderwood, half a dozen years older, was the watchful grown-up in their gang of boisterous clubbers. "We were all a big bunch of misfits – we were making our own family – but he could remember everybody's name and phone number," Lovejoy says. Seattle's clubbing and rock scenes had a strong appetite for drink and drugs, but Calderwood hardly even touched alcohol then. "The idea of being out of control on liquor was like a nightmare for him," remembers Wade Weigel, an early boyfriend and later business partner. David Petersen, another business partner, says intoxication did not fit the young Calderwood's restless business style: "His receptors were too busy, networking."

He also relished the bluffing and theatre of club promotion. He spoke in a quick, high voice, and "was very good at creating hype", says Nasir Rasheed, a British expat, then a would-be DJ, who joined forces with Calderwood, Lovejoy and another local promoter, Caroline Davenport, in the early 90s. "We called ourselves Tasty Shows. We did intricate flyer designs. We had drag queens on the door. We had a sense of can-do."

In 1998, they found a permanent home. On Capitol Hill, a tatty but vivid neighbourhood next to the city centre favoured by local music fans and musicians, a large street-corner rock club had recently closed as the grunge scene faded. With help from his father's building firm, Calderwood and his gang stripped the building of its rock club clutter, painted the interior in pale colours, installed an upmarket vegetarian restaurant at one end, and gave their new dance venue a name which was then as fashionably minimalist as its decor: ARO.Space – ARO standing for Arts and Revolution Organisation. For its two-year existence, ARO.Space both thrilled and baffled young Seattle. Tasty Shows flew in DJs and dance musicians from abroad, often from Britain, an ambitious move for a relative clubbing backwater such as Seattle.

Calderwood and Lovejoy sometimes went to London to persuade the musicians' managements in person. Since his denim-to-Japan days, Calderwood had loved foreign travel. "The guy flew more than anyone I'd ever known," says Edward Barber of the architects Universal Design Studio, who designed the London Ace. "He'd be here on Monday morning and say, 'See you Friday.' But he'd be in LA and Japan in between." Once he arrived in a foreign city, he would explore hungrily: almost always on foot, often alone, a spindly-legged, soft-spoken, perpetually polite American looking for local trends, up-and-coming areas, how the most interesting people lived – and how any of this might be converted into a business idea. "The eye was always working," Lovejoy says.

By the late 1990s, Tasty Shows had evolved into much more than a nightclub business. The Seattle region and the rest of the west coast was now studded with big computer and clothing companies keen to acquire more fashionable profiles; Tasty Shows organised parties and helped devise elaborate product launches for Microsoft, Nike and Gap. Tasty Shows had few hang-ups about putting their underground credibility and connections at the service of corporations. "We were co-opting street culture," Rasheed says, "just as street culture had co-opted corporate brands, like [the rappers] Run-DMC and Adidas."

In 1996, Tasty Shows redefined itself as an "experiential marketing" company and became Neverstop. "I came up with the name," Lovejoy says. "It was supposed to mean, 'Nothing can stop us.'" But it soon took on another resonance: "We were total workaholics. All our friends were people we worked with. We worked 16 hours a day. Alex and I never dated people. There was never any time."

"I've never met anybody with Alex's freneticism," says Universal Design Studio's Jay Osgerby. "He was often outwardly calm, a good listener. He didn't walk into a room and start bellowing. The energy was in his thoughts. And the way he thought was quite skittish – a great turnover of ideas."

Yet there was also a conservatism about Calderwood. Throughout his career, he liked objects and buildings that had history, warmth, texture. "He wasn't very good with technology," Rasheed says. "He liked reading magazines and books, not websites." In the early 1990s, he co-founded, with Weigel and Petersen, a chain of the most traditional institutions imaginable: barbers' shops. He loved the decor and rituals of Seattle's longest-established ones, but decided they could be made more youthful. Under the suitably retro name Rudy's, the first branch opened in Capitol Hill in 1992, offering cheapish haircuts by scruffy-cool young stylists, and shop interiors that carefully mixed the old (battered chrome and leather barbers' chairs) with the new (loud music and walls plastered with club flyers). Calderwood was two decades ahead of the curve, and his experiment worked. The Rudy's chain spread quickly across Seattle and then other US cities, giving him the cashflow to get into his next business: hotels.

The Ace in Seattle is a slightly strange place to stay. On a noisy street corner in Belltown, one of the city's beeriest districts, it occupies one whole floor and bits of two others in a lowish redbrick building. The walls are thin; some of its bedrooms open directly on to the tight lobby, and their doors do not quite reach the floor. The corridors are white and institutional, and the breakfast room is stark as a youth hostel, with wipe-clean seats and tables and washing machines, for the use of guests as well as staff, rumbling in one corner.

Its whiteness makes you feel as if you're in an art installation. Every room contains things you might want at home: clever little desks and swivel chairs; fancy popcorn and a good radio; exuberant street-style art, much of it by Shepard Fairey, who went on to design Obama's iconic "Hope" poster. Little-changed since it opened, the Seattle hotel was dreamt up by Calderwood, Weigel and a third partner, Doug Herrick. Weigel and Herrick suggest we meet in the breakfast room. There they sit down unselfconsciously at one of the wipe-clean tables, prosperous middle-aged businessmen now, cradling glass mugs of house coffee.

When they bought the lease, the building was a hive of bedsits for troubled tenants. "It was really run down: smelly rooms, yellow-stained walls, dark and crazy things written on them," Herrick says. "We were really stupid," Weigel adds. "The landlord said, 'Take the tenants, and you can collect rent while you remodel.'" Before the hotel was finished and the tenants had been rehoused, "One of them threw the entire contents of his room at people waiting at the bus stop outside."

Once the Ace opened, it was quickly successful: bands visiting Seattle stayed there; travel and design magazines, deftly alerted by Calderwood, gave it a lot of attention. Yet Ace did not open another hotel for eight years. Calderwood was busy with other enterprises, and Weigel and Herrick were cautious about the changes that expansion into a chain would inevitably bring to their tiny, slightly eccentric hotel business.

In 2007, Ace added a second hotel, in Portland, Oregon. The new hotel was quite small – 79 rooms; Portland was a similar market to Seattle: another rainy, cosy, liberal city less than 200 miles away. Then the company switched gear. Only two years later, it opened a five-acre desert resort with 170 rooms in Palm Springs, California; and a year after that, a 269-room hotel in New York. As the properties got bigger, so they began to offer more in-house amenities: cafes, bars, restaurants, DJs, concerts by bands, art spaces, shops selling Ace merchandise. They were all-enveloping environments.

In New York, Calderwood himself lived in the hotel with a few trusted lieutenants, while the building was being converted and fitted out, and during its first weeks of business. Practically, it made sense, but living at work could be gruelling. "The opening was delayed," deCarlo says. "We lived in that hotel for a very long time – three years? We moved from room to room, to whichever ones which were too broken to be sold to guests. We'd share a tiny table for our laptops. I remember fighting over it. Then we'd get dressed up and go down to the lobby for some fabulous party."

Meanwhile, the organisation changed. Larger hotels in more expensive locations required outside funding. In New York and Palm Springs, Ace worked with GB Lodging and GFI Development, veteran hotel investors and developers respectively, with more traditional business cultures and objectives: "aggressive asset management" and "maximising wealth for investors", as the GB Lodging website puts it. As front man, it often fell to Calderwood to explain and defend the hotels' unorthodox way of doing things to the men in suits. "Alex got the butt of that. He was the one who had to answer to everybody," Weigel says.

Calderwood would occasionally hint at dissatisfaction. "As we grow and things we're doing are more complex," he told the website coolhunting.com a month before he died, "there's a group of people who are like, 'Process, process, process.' And process is important, but... you have to allow whims."

Yet at the same time he was ambitious for the hotels. He wanted more. Increasingly, he spoke at industry conferences, even though "he hated being on stage", according to Margaret Czeisler, an old Seattle collaborator, who chaired him at one in 2010. For such public events, and for his proliferating meetings and press photos, Calderwood took to wearing a semi-uniform: Converse trainers and skinny jeans with a formal jacket, shirt and tie. Half-studenty, half-smart, it was a clever move for a hipster now in his 40s, who worked in both corporate and cool settings, and who needed to remind people of his unusual ability to play one culture off against the other. But he also began to look a little like someone who couldn't make up his mind which way to jump.

Besides its expanding hotel workforce, his company also created an in-house "creative services firm", Atelier Ace, based in both Portland and New York and employing four dozen people in design, graphics, marketing, event planning, and a constant search for commercial partners for the hotels, from fashion conglomerates to tiny artisan food producers. Calderwood hired his staff young, some as teenagers, and gave them freedom and responsibility in return for fierce commitment. "It's a self-educating unit that works hard and dreams big," he told the fashion website Hypebeast in 2012. A journalist who visited it recently found it "slightly cultish".

In 2012, Weigel and Herrick sold their Ace stakes. "Life had changed at Ace – we had big bosses now," Weigel says. "I liked little projects." DeCarlo left the Ace organisation after the New York hotel opened: "I'm a workaholic myself, but everything had become kind of a blur and my health was suffering." She was only in her mid-30s, as was Lovejoy when he left Neverstop in 2005: "I felt incredibly stressed, I noticed I was getting unhealthy, and I was so tired." He bought an organic farm on Orcas Island, a remote crescent of small settlements three hours north of Seattle, "and slept for about three months".

Lovejoy and the other escapees from the cultural engineering treadmill stayed in touch with Calderwood – he was good at maintaining relationships, however sporadic the contact – and they began to worry about him. "He was developing sleep issues," Lovejoy says. "And he was starting to suffer from hypervigilance and anxiety." Weigel adds, "He had panic attacks. He went into hospital during one, thinking he was having a heart attack." Another friend says, "I went to Palm Springs to help out with the launch of that hotel. I'd never seen him looking so terrible: so stressed out and overweight and pale." Calderwood ate almost all his meals in restaurants and smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. His sole exercise was walking, almost always in cities, with his professional eyes and brain still hard at work. Rasheed says, "When he was younger, he was so fresh-faced and handsome. When I saw him in the last few years, he looked tired. I'd say to him, 'I'm worried for you.' And he'd say, 'If I can just get this, this and this done, then I'll slow down.'"

Sporadically, Calderwood would find some equilibrium by undergoing a cleanse, a faintly spiritual, ritualised fast with one of a few trusted friends. "For a week or a weekend, we'd take herbal supplements, drink juices and shakes containing Bentonite [a laxative] and Selenium [a mineral]," Kai Ichikawa says. Calmly spoken and measured, he had been friends with Calderwood since school. "We'd do some light exercise, watch movies, listen to music, chat. After the cleanse, Alex would always remark on how white the whites of our eyes were, how clear our skin was."

Ichikawa worked as a financial analyst and then for Microsoft – "I was the straitlaced friend" – and lived in the more suburban and sedate south of Seattle. Calderwood would come for dinner, and Ichikawa would force him to stop talking about work. "As the Ace grew, he was carrying a heavy weight." They would also go on short road trips and holidays, to the empty Oregon coast or Hawaii, away from Calderwood's all-consuming urban interests. In Hawaii, they rented a house up a track with wild chickens in the yard, and drank wine and listened to music.

Yet in 2013 Calderwood was too busy even to meet. He was barely even in Seattle. In theory, it was still his home: since his businesses had taken off, he had kept a penthouse in a lovely, airy 1960s block above the city centre. The bedroom was full of bin bags stuffed with magazines, clothing samples and newspaper cuttings. But he was home so little that he let deCarlo move in. A decade younger, she was loyal, even devoted to him, more a platonic partner than a manager, and he trusted her accordingly, allowing her to tidy all his muddle and have access to his emails.

Calderwood struggled to allow other people into his life. There were intermittent boyfriends, but none lasted long. "He said he always had dysfunctional relationships, that he was always falling in love with the wrong person," says someone who got to know him last year. Calderwood saw his father only sporadically.

In Calderwood's Seattle circle, there was concern about his drinking and drug-taking. "He was so sly about it – he hid it from people," Lovejoy says. Perhaps even from himself: "He valued self-control a lot." When the two worked at Neverstop in the 90s and early 00s, Lovejoy continues, they went through "periods of drinking. I did coke with him once. But it all started properly after 2005: a lot of drinking, coke, pill-popping, whatever else he was doing. He was very tight-lipped about it."

Rasheed says that, after Calderwood's sober youth, he was shocked when he "saw that behaviour creeping in: Alex drinking vodkas". Weigel says Calderwood's drinking was "up and down" in his last years. DeCarlo says Calderwood drank "really heavily with people not related to work, not from a work context". "He was very tight-lipped about it," Lovejoy says. "Even when I dropped him off at rehab in 2010." On one thing, all Calderwood's friends agree: he drank and took drugs to try to relax. "He just couldn't find another way to find... stillness."

When Calderwood arrived in London in 2012 to supervise the building of the Ace, two years on from rehab, he seemed sober again. Someone else who spent a lot of time with Calderwood in Shoreditch last year remembers him "having the occasional drink", but mostly consuming green tea with self-conscious abstemiousness. "He was very sensitive about the drinking and drugs [issue]." He feared it would put off his financial backers: "He would say, 'I am responsible for so many people's livelihoods and so much money!'"

The London project was particularly ambitious. Instead of the period conversions in which Ace had previously specialised, the new site was a recently built former chain hotel, the Crowne Plaza, bland and hulking and set on one of the area's least interesting and most congested stretches of road, with a wall of buses often juddering and fuming right in front. Yet London had attracted Calderwood for decades, ever since he had contrived visits there as a music promoter. In 2012, the transformation of the hotel started.

DeCarlo visited last summer and found Calderwood in a seemingly upbeat mood. He was living in the half-finished hotel, and composing himself for the mayhem every morning by listening to slow music: Laurie Anderson or the soundtrack to the film Blade Runner. "He really fell in love with Shoreditch. We both had jetlag, so we would sit up at night, on the steps of the hotel, and smoke and look for foxes." Calderwood was fascinated by the mazy old area's increasingly upmarket restaurants and cafes and gastropubs, was constantly "writing little scribbly notes and taking tons of pictures, and passing them on to the cultural engineers at the Atelier".

His approach to the hotel was similarly restless. "He'd never leave it alone," Barber remembers. "Rearranging the furniture in the bar. Or: 'I want that ceiling darker.'" In July 2013, the fashion magazine Fantastic Man photographed Calderwood for a profile, pacing the roof of the London Ace with a preoccupied look, a woolly hat pulled tight down. The hotel was scheduled to start trading in September, and his Panama and LA outposts were planned to open in November and January respectively. It was an optimistic, possibly reckless, timetable. "There were people around Alex at Ace who needed his drive," one friend says, "and they may have turned a blind eye to the consequences."

London did open on time, but there were teething troubles with the heating and hot water. Panama and Los Angeles were both late. Calderwood spent last autumn flying between all three. By this stage, one of the great modern salesmen of communal spaces and experiences was increasingly alone. In October, he also flew to Australia to speak at a hotel conference. The stage lighting showed bags under his eyes and a heaviness to his chin and cheeks. His shoulders and hands were jumpy, knocking the microphone.

On 8 November, a Friday, he travelled to England. He spent the weekend with friends at the coast. The following week, his diary was full of meetings about the Shoreditch Ace. He moved into one of the hotel's larger rooms. On the Wednesday, 13 November, he didn't turn up for a meeting with Universal Design Studio, even though their offices are only a few minutes' walk away.

That night, back in his Seattle apartment, deCarlo looked at his inbox, she told The Stranger magazine. "I saw how many unopened emails there were, and all of a sudden [it] hit me that he was operating past his maximum... I went to bed thinking, 'This is going to be the death of him.'"

Calderwood collapsed the next day. Some of his friends think drugs may have played a part, but none considers them the fundamental cause. "His schedule, his work – it killed him," Weigel says. "I wasn't shocked when he died. I just never thought it would happen so soon."

How do you work less when you love your job, and when material for that work is everywhere you look? In an increasingly connected, workaholic world, it is an increasingly common dilemma, one that some of the caffeinated young entrepreneurs working in the lobbies of Calderwood's hotels may one day have to face. Yet in his final year he did make an effort to solve it. Early in 2013 he bought some land next to Lovejoy's farm on Orcas Island.

The journey there alone makes you slow down: a congested freeway, then zigzagging suburban roads, then an infrequent ferry. The boat wanders through an immense-looking archipelago of deep blue water and dark green islands before docking at Orcas. From the tiny quay, the road meanders through woods and sunlit orchards – the island gets better weather than usually overcast Seattle – and passes wooden houses and cabins where hippies and other city escapees have been dropping anchor for decades.

Lovejoy is a good advertisement for island life: stubbled and mellow, and still boyish-looking in his 40s. We sit on a length of driftwood on a beach as the sun sinks into the sea. The last time he saw Calderwood was in January 2013. "He came out here for New Year. He said to me, 'Just let me open these hotels, and the money from them will give me space.' Alex bought a cabin, and he was doing work on it. It would have given him an excuse to come out here and be healthy. I was trying to get him into exercising. We did some hiking. His plan was to build the Ace into something that didn't have to depend on him."

He may have succeeded. According to Ace Hotel's head of PR, speaking from the Atelier Ace headquarters in Portland, "There's been a huge outpouring at Ace about Alex passing. But as far as selling actual hotel rooms is concerned, I don't think it's had an impact, one way or the other."

Alex Calderwood is gone, but the business of cool goes on.

EntrepreneursSmall businessClubbingDance musicDeath and dyingLondonTravel & leisureAndy Beckett
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Tony Blair: from New Labour hero to political embarrassment

Friend of the Murdochs, adviser to authoritarian regimes and associate of the super-rich – the former prime minister's reputation is on a downward spiral. And each new revelation manages to be more jaw-dropping than the last

In Tony Blair's uneven but occasionally startling autobiography, A Journey, published in 2010, there is a chapter that makes particularly interesting reading now. It covers his final, slightly besieged years as prime minister, from mid-2005 to mid-2007. "In this time," writes Blair, "I was trying to wear … a kind of psychological armour which the arrows simply bounced off, and to achieve a kind of weightlessness that allowed me, somehow, to float above the demonic rabble tearing at my limbs. There was courage in [this behaviour] and I look back at it now with pride," he concludes. "I was … not unafraid exactly, but near to being reckless about my own political safety."

The chapter's title is "Toughing It Out". Last week, during the phone-hacking trial of Rebekah Brooks, an email from the former News of the World editor emerged, sent the day after the disgraced rightwing tabloid was shut down in 2011 and six days before she was arrested. To her then boss, James Murdoch, Brooks wrote: "I had an hour on the phone to Tony Blair. He said … Keep strong … It will pass. Tough up. He is available for you, KRM [Rupert Murdoch] and me as an unofficial adviser but needs to be between us."

As Labour leader and prime minister, one of Blair's defining characteristics was his readiness – canny or disgraceful, according to political taste – to make accommodations with powerful rightwing interest groups, not least the Murdoch press. The Brooks email, the latest in a succession of sometimes jaw-dropping revelations about Blair's behaviour since he abruptly left Westminster politics seven years ago, suggested that his ease with the left's traditional enemies had in fact deepened: into an instinctive feeling that he and they were on the same side.

With his salesman's smile and large self-belief, his ex-barrister's ability to accept and argue not necessarily compatible things, Blair has always been a slippery and restless public figure. "He's kind of a freewheeler, and always was," says the historian of the Labour party Ross McKibbin. "Being a freewheeler did him well, initially." Yet since Downing Street, Blair's "journey", already often controversial, has taken him into ever more contentious territories.

In 2008, just as bankers were beginning to be seen as the villains of the world economy, he accepted an advisory post at the American investment bank JP Morgan. According to the Financial Times in 2012, it "pays him about £2.5m a year". In 2011, through a consulting firm he swiftly created after Downing Street, Tony Blair Associates, he began advising oil-rich, authoritarian Kazakhstan. "Torture remains commonplace" there, says Amnesty International.

Last month, visiting Egypt, Blair defended the 2013 overthrow of the elected government of Mohamed Morsi: "The fact is, the Muslim Brotherhood tried to take the country away from its basic values … The army have intervened, at the will of the people, but in order to take the country to the next stage of its development, which should be democratic." Even with those last four, slightly hedged words, Blair's argument eerily echoed that notoriously made four decades ago by Augusto Pinochet and the Chilean military, when they overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende, an event still notorious in Labour circles: "We justify our intervention to depose a government which is illegitimate, immoral and unrepresentative of the overwhelming sentiment of the nation."

The Blair government once briefly thrilled the left by allowing Pinochet to be arrested in London. But that was in 1998; the days when even the faintest whiff of socialism clung to Blair are long gone. In A Journey, published four months after the coalition took office, he wrote: "If governments don't tackle deficits, the bill is footed by taxpayers." And: "The role of government is to stabilise [the economy] and then get out of the way." A more helpful endorsement of David Cameron's state-shrinking austerity strategy from a non-Tory would be hard to imagine.

Since 2007, during straitened times for most Britons, Blair has seemed increasingly comfortable being around – and being one of – "those with money", as he refers to the super-rich in his book with telling casualness. "Blair mixes with the Buffetts and the Gateses," says John Kampfner, author of Blair's Wars, "where it is seen as matter of no great surprise that you arrive in a private jet. In Blairland, there is a sense of: 'I have become part of the Davos global elite. But I haven't been able to earn properly until now.'"

Blair hotly disputes this picture of his lifestyle. "This notion that I want to be a billionaire with a yacht; I don't! I am never going to be part of the super-rich. I have no interest in that at all," he told the Financial Times in 2012. But his intricate and often secretive set of consulting and speech-making businesses – in 2009 a Blair spokesman declined even to explain the name of one of them, Windrush Ventures, to the Guardian – have helped build a personal fortune "estimated at £70m", reported the Daily Telegraph last month. This also includes a provocative amount of property for a political figure in a crowded country currently going through one of its periodic home-ownership panics. Since moving out of Downing Street, Blair's London home has been a capacious cream and dark brick terrace in Connaught Square, near Hyde Park, with a substantial mews house behind and armed policemen perpetually guarding both. His country residence, acquired in 2008, is even grander: a Queen Anne mansion in Buckinghamshire called South Pavilion, with swimming pool and tennis court. His tycoon's tan and leanness suggest he enjoys both.

The current issue of Vanity Fair magazine quotes an already-infamous swooning note about him reportedly written by Rupert Murdoch's ex-wife Wendi Deng: "He has such good body and he has really really good legs [and] Butt …" Rumours that Blair and Deng had an affair have been around ever since Murdoch suddenly filed for divorce last summer; Blair has repeatedly denied it and Deng told Vanity Fair she would not "engage in public allegations or respond to negative claims". But there is no denying his personal closeness both to Deng and, until the collapse of her marriage, Murdoch himself. In 2010, weeks before the general election at which Murdoch's papers did their best to drive Labour from office, Blair secretly became godfather to one of Deng and Murdoch's daughters.

"You couldn't make it up," says a former member of the New Labour inner circle. "Just when you thought Tony's behaviour couldn't get any more bizarre … His actions would be strange even for the most dyed-in-the-wool capitalist ex-prime minister, but for a Labour one, I think it looks terrible. It makes mugs of many of the people who supported him in office. He's trashed the New Labour brand."

Other Labour ex-premiers have embarrassed the party. Harold Wilson became a famously disastrous chatshow host; Ramsay MacDonald led a Tory-dominated coalition and was expelled from the party – Blair has not done anything so traitorous, so far. Yet McKibbin says that all of them "had a different attitude to money. Wilson was pretty poor when he died. [Jim] Callaghan had quite a nice farm, which he retired to." Even the derided Gordon Brown's near-silence since losing office looks steadily more dignified with each controversy about Blair's new career.

In fact, it does have some high-minded elements. His website lists the Tony Blair Faith Foundation ("to promote respect and understanding about the world's major religions"); the Tony Blair Sports Foundation ("to increase participation in sport … particularly by those who are currently socially excluded"); work on "African governance" and "breaking the climate deadlock"; and his role as representative of the international quartet, on behalf of the UN, EU, the US and Russia, to try to find a peaceful settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

Blair is not paid for any of these roles, which generally receive less press attention. He argues that his richly rewarded commercial work is undertaken mainly to subsidise them. And he says he takes great care to avoid conflicts of interest: for example, doing no business in Israel or the Palestinian territories, to avoid damaging his credibility there as the quartet's representative.

The problem is, his credibility as a sort of freelance super-diplomat in the Middle East and elsewhere is damaged already. His almost unqualified support for Israel as prime minister, his crucial backing then for the invasion of Iraq, his fundamental agreement with the bellicose foreign policy of George Bush – all this historical baggage follows Blair around. "It would be hard for him to move into working for more liberal international institutions," says a former ally, "because he's toxic."

Nor does Blair show much sign of having thought afresh about the shape of the world since leaving office. Last summer, during the clamour for Britain to intervene militarily in Syria, he was one of the loudest hawks. Ed Miliband ignored him. In much of its foreign and domestic policy, Labour is moving politely but firmly away from Blairism now. Miliband's populist leftwing attacks on capitalist "predators" contrast with Blair's insistence in A Journey that during the financial crisis "the 'market' did not fail". Later in the book he adds: "The danger for Labour [after losing the 2010 election] is that we … move decisively … to the left. If we do, we will lose even bigger next time."

We will see. But for now the opinion polls suggest that Blair's warning may look foolish when the votes are counted in 2015. Either way, many in Labour have stopped listening to the man who led them to three handsome general election victories, and who was once one of the most popular figures in British political history. "People I know in the party don't think about him very much nowadays," McKibbin says.

Blair is only 60. One of his problems is probably that he left Downing Street too young. Callaghan was 67 when he stopped being prime minister in 1979. But British political leaders, like bosses in many fields, have become steadily younger since then. Just like Blair, David Cameron and possibly Miliband too will have decades to fill after the Downing Street removal van comes.

A well-connected New Labour source says: "Someone who knows Tony very well said to a friend of mine recently: 'He's very unhappy.' It's a false life he's leading. And the rich are boring. What has happened to Tony has elements of tragedy."

Other Blair-watchers see his trajectory differently. "I don't think what people think of him has ever worried him too much," says McKibbin. Blair's Connaught Square house is right next to Edgware Road, one of the centres of Arab London, and of potential outrage, at the very least, at his Middle East stances. Meanwhile the plush London offices of all his overlapping enterprises are right across from the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, as if to taunt critics who claim he is America's poodle.

Last month, Blair was eating with his family and some friends in a London restaurant when a barman working there, inspired by the website arrestblair.org, tried to perform a citizen's arrest on him, for "a crime against peace … namely your decision to launch an unprovoked war against Iraq". The Daily Mail reported: "Blair attempted to engage in a debate before one of his sons went to get security."

In private, ex-prime minister Blair may be tormented and unfulfilled, but in public he remains a smooth performer. Will that be enough?

Tony BlairLabourWendi DengRupert MurdochMiddle East and North AfricaAndy Beckett
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Battles over language

Raymond Williams's pithy political compendium Keywords has been reissued, and is the inspiration behind a new exhibition at Tate Liverpool. Andy Beckett on an addictive book that captures a Britain in flux

Thirty-eight years ago, in a slightly kinder age, the unpredictable leftwing thinker Raymond Williams published his thoughts on the word "welfare". They occupied a quarter of a page. In England, he wrote, the word "was commonly used from C14" – typically brusque Williams shorthand for the 14th century – "to indicate happiness or prosperity". In the early 20th century, he went on, the word began to acquire an "extended sense … of organised care and provision … Thus welfare policy (1905); welfare centres (1917). The welfare state … was first named in 1939."

In half a dozen terse sentences, almost in note form except for their precise language and punctuation, Williams sketched seven centuries of social progress. But he also gave a hint that it could be undone: "A subsidiary meaning" of welfare, he wrote, "usually derogatory in the recorded instances, was of merrymaking: 'such ryot and welfare and ydlenesse' (1470); 'wine and such welfare' (1577)". More than perhaps any other postwar British socialist, Williams could see the ancient but potent tools the English language provided for rightwing editorialists.

His micro-essay on welfare was one of 110 that he published in 1976, all of them on contentious terms commonly used in English. He assembled them into a slim, strangely addictive book called Keywords, which is being republished this month with an accompanying exhibition at Tate Liverpool. Organised alphabetically – three consecutive entries were "bourgeois", "bureaucracy" and "capitalism" – Keywords seemed both madly ambitious and of broad interest in the argumentative Britain of the mid-70s. On campuses, in local councils, in squats and trade unions, even in the cautious old Labour party, the radical left was at or near its modern zenith, and increasingly saw language as a crucial political battleground. In the Conservative party and the proliferating rightwing thinktanks, a new, equally language-conscious radicalism, personified by the pithy new Tory leader Margaret Thatcher, was also on the rise. And among intellectually inclined Britons, the insights of postwar French theory into how words might have loaded or shifting or slippery meanings were belatedly circulating.

Williams was a little different from the fashionable Frenchmen. He was already 55 when Keywords came out, tweedy and teaching quietly at Cambridge. He had been better known two decades before, in the 50s, when his book Culture and Society (1958) had iconoclastically and influentially redefined culture as "responses in thought and feeling" to what is going on in a society rather than, as previously often thought, mainly a matter of paintings and orchestras. It sold 200,000 copies worldwide and made Williams, from a rural Welsh working-class background, as he often reminded his often middle-class colleagues and readers, into one of the stars of the postwar New Left, an intellectual and political movement not short of fresh and charismatic thinkers.

Nevertheless, his prose usually required patient reading. His slowly uncoiling sentences were full of commas and semicolons, abstractions and generalisations, and only revealed the direction of his thinking if you made it to the full stops. In a typical passage in his 1976 introduction to Keywords, he writes: "The surpassing confidence of any particular use of a word, within a group or within a period, is very difficult to question." It's a good point, but you might have to read it more than once to get it.

The appeal of the Keywords entries themselves was and is their relative breeziness. Williams wrote them haphazardly over three decades, starting in the 50s: collecting words to discuss, drafting skeletal essays, fattening up some to a few pages, steadily accumulating a whole file of material, which he originally intended as an appendix to Culture and Society but expanded into something more intriguing. On the surface it was a history of language and ideas; underneath it was a history of England's economy, politics and society since the late middle ages. The rise of the middle class and the free market, the industrial revolution, the effects of democracy and leftwing dissent, the increasing Americanisation and atomisation of 20th-century England – all these themes recur in Williams's economical discussions of his chosen words. For example, "consumer": "In almost all its early English uses, consume had an unfavourable sense; it meant to destroy, to use up, to waste … It was from C18 that consumer began to emerge in a neutral sense in descriptions of [the] economy … In C20 … the predominance of the capitalist model ensured its widespread and often overwhelming extension to such fields as politics, education and health."

Similarly, the word "private": "It came into English … from privare … to bereave or deprive... It acquired the sense of secret and concealed … In C17 and especially C18 [came] the steady association of private with personal, as strongly favourable terms." The history of "private", Williams concluded tartly, "is a record of the legitimation of a bourgeois view of life".

Anger and melancholy at how the modern world had turned out gave some of the entries a charge. By 1976, for all the potency of the 70s left, it was obvious to its more far-sighted members, including Williams, that a socialist society was as far away as ever. Keywords still gave a lot of space to terms that preoccupied socialists – "masses" got five pages; "class", the longest entry, got nine – but even these essays sometimes acknowledged an erosion of the left's preferred definitions. Thus, the entry for "equality" included a section on "equality of opportunity, which can be glossed as 'equal opportunity to become unequal'". Williams died in 1988; I suspect New Labour would not have pleased him.

Yet Keywords was not too curmudgeonly. Williams also delighted in how words mutated and generated ambiguities: "'Native' is one of those interesting words which … are applied … in ways which produce radically different and even opposite senses and tones." Crucially, the book did not attempt to be definitive, with all the exhausting – and ultimately futile – pedantry that would have required. Instead, its contents felt deliberately provisional. Entries varied constantly in length and tone, from the academic to the conversational. Digressions were frequent, generating essays within essays as Williams's investigations of language restlessly branched out into new areas. Meanwhile, cross-references between the entries and the book's minimal, alphabetical structure encouraged readers to follow their own paths through Keywords. For all Williams's roots in austere postwar leftism, this book fitted – perhaps even on some level accepted – a time of greater consumer choice and individualism: in Britain in 1976, much of what is still thought of as "the 80s" was already well underway.

In 1983 Williams published an expanded edition of Keywords, adding 21 more entries. A few of them were traditional leftwing words – "exploitation", "underprivileged" – but others suggested a world moving away from pure left-right politics – "ecology", "ethnic" – or away from politics altogether – "genius", "technology". Yet Williams's eye for the power balances within language was sharp as ever: "Ethnic has been in English since C14. It is from ethnikos … heathen."

Keywords remained an influential text through the 80s, with another edition (without further additions) in 1988. The bite-sized entries, the sense that the book could educate you about the key areas of British history and discourse at one sitting, Williams's semi-guru status – all were appealing to students and young academics. In 2005 a sequel to Keywords was even produced, New Keywords, written by an international array of noted scholars – Williams's book receiving the same sort of posthumous treatment as the first James Bond novels.

Even now, the open-endedness of Keywords prevents it from seeming dated. Its highly personal, impatient, connection-seeking style fits the internet age well. Only occasionally do its origins in the distant mid-20th century show, as when Williams writes of the word "pop", as in pop music, that "the shortening" – from popular – "gave the word a lively informality but opened it … to a sense of the trivial". Williams was born in 1921: by the time the Beatles formed, he was already pushing 40.

The Keywords exhibition at Tate Liverpool, subtitled Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain but ranging wider than that decade, uses some of the book's terms to frame and organise almost 60 modern artworks, some of them more lurid or polemical than Williams might have chosen. There is Peter Kennard's painting Haywain with Cruise Missiles (1980), which loads Constable's famous horsedrawn wagon with sinister, utterly foreign-looking cylinders, suggesting a bucolic England about to be desecrated by the arrival of these American nuclear weapons; and Helen Chadwick's Carcass (1986), a hollow, seven-foot glass column filled with vile but beautiful layers of rotting vegetables. When the notorious original was exhibited at the ICA 28 years ago, it leaked and then exploded.

The exhibition and the book do share a sense of a country in flux, where fundamental issues are up for grabs. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the years of apparent British economic stability and Blair's deftly anaesthetising consensus politics, this seemed less so – in 2001 a senior New Labour figure told me that it was "impossible to have a conversation with anyone in the cabinet about capitalism" – and Keywords and Williams himself were partially forgotten.

But now the turbulence of the 70s and early 80s has returned, and battles over language with it. "Scrounger", "austerity", "super-rich" – if only Williams were here to examine their usage. It is either an irony or quite fitting that Keywords is being republished by HarperCollins, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, the book and newspaper conglomerate that has done, and continues to do, so much to shape the everyday vocabulary of politics and economics according to the right's needs. Until the left does the same, it will struggle.

• Andy Beckett is writing a book about how Britain changed in the early 1980s. Keywords has just been reissued by Fourth Estate.

PoliticsSocietyTate LiverpoolArtAndy Beckett
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Dodgy regime? Unruly protesters? Bell Pottinger can help

From the ousted Thai PM to fracking company Cuadrilla and Asma al-Assad, the PR firm Bell Pottinger represents some of the world's most notorious clients. Tim Bell, who masterminded Margaret Thatcher's election campaigns, explains why he thinks his business is a force for good

At first sight, the Curzon Street offices of Bell Pottinger Private are everything a conspiracy theorist could hope for. Next door, guarded by uniformed police officers with machine guns, squats the immense embassy of Saudi Arabia, a country with which the controversial PR firm's even more controversial chairman, Tim Bell, has had decades of opaque, often defence-related dealings. Beyond the embassy is the rest of Mayfair, where businesses are discreet, ethics are flexible, and rich people with reputations to upgrade are in increasingly plentiful supply.

In the lobby of Bell Pottinger, there are cream leather benches for visitors. The day's newspapers hang from clips on the wall. The implication is that Bell, who has worked in PR or advertising since 1959, can get you or your company or government into them – or quietly arrange the opposite. "We keep a lot of people out of the media," says James Henderson, the firm's chief executive.

From the lobby, a tiny lift whisks you up to Bell's top-floor office. It is a long corner room, with a row of windows looking out over Mayfair's wine-red and bone-white rooftops. In the centre of the room is a large desk, almost in the shape of a quotation mark. Along its outer curve are a few chairs for clients. On the inner, there is an oldish computer, two telephones, two used coffee cups, a half-full ashtray and Bell himself.

Lord Bell of Belgravia, who was knighted by his longstanding client and political soulmate Margaret Thatcher in 1990, is 72. But he is still working full-time, and still looks like an old-fashioned PR man from central casting: slicked-back hair, assertive tie, tailored shirt, quick smile. He talks in a half-gravelly, half-chocolatey voice, and instantly drops your first name into his quick sentences. "He is an icon in the business," says Mark Borkowski, another British PR veteran and a historian of the industry. "A lot of people have tried to write his obituary, but they underestimate his steely determination. He has a very powerful network, contacts all over the world. Bell Pottinger are a formidable multinational. For many, many years they have operated in the shadows, as agents of influence."

Bell grants interviews rarely, and then usually to rightwing newspapers, his preferred journalistic conduits. But sometimes he wants to reach a wider audience. Today, sitting back from his desk in a shaft of cigarette-fogged sunlight, he is in expansive, self-deprecating mode.

"The Thatcher legacy – of course I live off it to some extent," he says. "What I did for her has been grossly exaggerated by some, and grossly underestimated by others." According to Mark Hollingsworth's biography of Bell, The Ultimate Spin Doctor, he advised her on everything from how to relax on television – "to melt her almost frozen expression, Bell would sit behind the camera and pull faces" – to how to attack Labour, including the famous "Labour Isn't Working" poster campaign, featuring an endless queue of the unemployed (actually Young Conservatives borrowed for the shoot), that helped discredit the Callaghan government in the late 70s – shortly before the Thatcher government sent unemployment much higher. "My profound belief," Bell continues, "is that a small number of words, a strong visual image, can change the way people think." At Bell Pottinger, which he co-founded in 1998, "We tell stories – I don't mean lies. We work for people who want to tell their side of the story."

The government of Sri Lanka; FW de Klerk, when he ran against Nelson Mandela for president of South Africa; Thaksin Shinawatra, the ousted Thai premier, whom protesters claim still controls the country; Asma al-Assad, the wife of the president of Syria; Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus; Rebekah Brooks after the phone-hacking scandal broke; the repressive governments of Bahrain and Egypt; the American occupying administration in Iraq; the polluting oil company Trafigura; the fracking company Cuadrilla; the athlete Oscar Pistorius after he was charged with murder; the Pinochet Foundation during its campaign against the former Chilean dictator's British detention; the much-criticised arms conglomerate BAE Systems – Bell or Bell Pottinger has represented all of them. "They get involved in lots of 'special situations', in reputational and crisis PR," says Alec Mattinson, the deputy editor of PR Week. "The reputation they have is as an agency that goes where other agencies would fear to tread."

This notoriety has had consequences. In 2011, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Independent published a Bell Pottinger exposé, including covertly filmed company executives (though not Bell or Henderson) bragging about their influence over the Sri Lankan government and the British Conservative party, and about the firm's expertise in "all sorts of dark arts". This August, anti-fracking protesters superglued themselves to the doors of Bell Pottinger's other London office, on a busy street in Holborn, during the morning rush hour. Last month, the BBC3 satirical show The Revolution Will Be Televised broadcast its attempt to gatecrash this year's Bell Pottinger summer party – a Whitehall gathering of dark-suited men with worldly auras – by a comedian dressed as the Devil and then as Hitler.

Bell and the company have a range of responses to such frontal attacks. One is to claim victimhood: "The left is extremely strong, and very active, and very keen on demonstrating its point of view by shouting at people," he says, with a world-weary shrug. "It's become very fashionable to shoot the messenger."

Another approach is to affect casualness. When I ask if Bell Pottinger is still working for the Sri Lankan government – citing commercial confidentiality or official secrecy, the firm does not publish a full list of clients – Bell says airily: "We stopped in … 2009? Or 2010? I might have got the dates wrong."

Then he switches seamlessly to a sterner, man-of-the-world tone: "It's a fashionable thing to criticise the way the Sri Lankan government has behaved. David Cameron had one meeting in the north of the country with 200 people who have lost relatives. You have to remember there was a 30-year civil war. The Tamil Tigers weren't exactly gentle, nice people. And for Britain to ponce around the world talking about human rights after what we did in Afghanistan … It's what Winston Churchill called 'our usual export': hypocrisy."

Finally, and most ambitiously, Bell claims that his company is in fact a force for good. "We are actually decent people," he says. "We do know right from wrong. The reason we worked for Lukashenko in Belarus was because he told me: 'We want to go along the path to democracy.' We actually got six political prisoners released."

The shameless incompatability of all these arguments is typical Bell: always slippery, always trying a new line on you, and, deep down, probably trying to persuade himself. "He's mercurial, quite emotional," says Hollingsworth. "He can suddenly turn."

Yet the question that hovers over Bell Pottinger is whether this theatrical, highly personalised approach exactly meets the needs of a modern PR multinational. After 20 highly quotable minutes in Bell's office, we are joined by Henderson. The chief executive, who only came to the company three years ago, is a quarter of a century younger than Bell, and has a much more sober background in financial and corporate PR. Unlike Bell, he keeps his suit jacket on.

At first, while Bell talks and talks, Henderson stays quiet, rolling a pen between his fingers. Then, just as Bell is concluding a long, involved anecdote about why he turned down a chance to work for the authoritarian president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, Henderson interjects: "We have a very, very non-controversial client base now," he says. "Our client base doesn't reflect what you read about in the press."

The Bell Pottinger website mentions work for dozens of less-than-sinister entities such as Kurt Geiger, Daylesford Organic and the London Chamber Orchestra. Yet many of the commercial sectors the company lists as focuses for its PR activities – "oil and gas", "mining", "financial institutions", "Russia" – suggest a readiness to work at the more rugged end of international capitalism. Your attitude to the company doing such work, says Bell, flashing a wide smile, "does depend on your definition of controversial".

Henderson argues that Bell Pottinger is disproportionately targeted by critics of London's hard-nosed PR world. "These 'controversial' clients – we do pitch for them against other PR companies," he points out.

PR Week's Mattinson agrees: "The idea that they're the only company prepared to work for controversial clients is a [mistake]." In the magazine's league table of PR firms operating in Britain, Bell Pottinger is at number five; Hill & Knowlton, a bigger American rival, controversial since the 30s, which has also promoted repressive governments and fracking, is just behind at number seven. Portland PR, a newer British firm set up by Tony Blair's former aide Tim Allan, has already achieved some notoriety for its work for authoritarian Kazakhstan and Russia.

One reason, perhaps, why Bell Pottinger is singled out for special criticism is its lingering air of rightwing tribalism. When I ask Henderson why they haven't ever worked for controversial leftwing governments, such as the many currently in South America, he looks at me slightly uncomprehendingly, then says: "We've never been approached by a leftwing government, that I'm aware of." Bell adds: "You don't want an adviser that doesn't agree with you."

Bell grew up in the aspiring, often politically conservative, outer suburbs of north London. His background was entrepreneurial and middle class: his Irish father was a gifted salesman and his Australian mother came from a shop-owning family, like Thatcher. As a young man during the 60s, Bell was less interested in politics than in his advertising career, and the flash clothes and cars it paid for, but he found time to canvass for several north London Tory MPs, including Thatcher. When she hired Bell and his then employers Saatchi & Saatchi to work for her party in 1978, he and she immediately established a rapport. He became one of the closest in her inner circle of clever, often slightly roguish informal advisers, partly because they had a similar worldview: us-against-them, fiercely anti-communist, unquestioningly pro-market. "If anyone inspired me, it's Ayn Rand," says Bell, namechecking the famously confrontational American rightwing author. Long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bell still privately referred to journalists he disliked as "commies" and "pinkos".

Henderson is less of a crusader. Privately educated, unlike Bell, more smartly spoken, more quietly dressed, he could be a Mayfair hedge-fund trader. "We are all supportive of Tim and his politics," he says with a slightly fixed smile. Bell Pottinger's partisan and more straightforwardly corporate impulses, he goes on, "can work well side by side". In a sense, this is right. Bell's work for the Conservatives in the 70s and 80s helped create a world – of London as a hub for the international rich, of the privatised utilities, of a post-communist, status-hungry eastern Europe – that has produced clients for Bell Pottinger, and Bell's previous PR enterprises, ever since.

Much of what Bell Pottinger does for these clients is commercially confidential, but the company also needs to promote itself, and its website offers surprisingly detailed case studies. "Katrin Radmacher is a German heiress," begins one. "She asked Bell Pottinger to help uphold her reputation and manage the media during a legal marathon with her former husband … After each ruling, Bell Pottinger issued a highly quotable statement on her behalf to the world's media … When misconceptions arose, Bell Pottinger quietly briefed the press. A Tatler interview, establishing her as a privileged, yes, but unassuming mother of two who'd tried to save her marriage, was syndicated in the Sunday Times. Evening Standard and FT interviews, and a Times leader, were sympathetic …"

Bell Pottinger likes to portray itself as a dexterous media manipulator, yet sometimes the process is more fraught. In 1998, the campaign it helped orchestrate for the release of General Pinochet had a clever slogan – "reconciliation not retribution" – but also internal tensions. In 2000 Charles Alexander, a pro-Pinochet figure in the City of London, told me: "I said on the first day after he [Pinochet] was arrested [in Britain], 'He's got to get very ill, very quickly.' But Tim Bell disagreed with me. He said: 'Pinochet got rid of the commies, and that's our argument.'" In the end, the campaigners settled for an awkward mixture of both approaches, apolitically playing up Pinochet's frail health while also producing and distributing crude rightwing propaganda pamphlets and articles about the elected leftwing leader he had overthrown, Salvador Allende. The general eventually flew back to Chile, but with his international reputation even lower.

Nowadays, Henderson's strategy for Bell Pottinger sometimes seems more safety-first. Last year, he, Bell, and the firm's co-founder, Piers Pottinger, a City of London PR veteran, organised a management buyout of the company, extricating it from the bigger communications conglomerate Chime. Since then, Henderson has emphasised "rebuilding the Bell Pottinger brand", getting the firm "up the league tables", and winning a greater "number of mandates [contracts]". Much of this strategy is being enacted not in Mayfair, but in the Holborn office, which houses Henderson and nine-tenths of the firm's 250 staff. The Bell Pottinger premises there have a security guard in the lobby – perhaps on the lookout for more protesters with superglue – but otherwise seem a little more prosaic: a single floor of a heavy postwar office block, above a Sports Direct and an M&S.

In some ways, the PR business is getting harder and less glamorous. The internet and particularly social media are making Bell Pottinger's traditional publicity channel – the newspapers hung up in its Mayfair office, long susceptible to Bell's smooth phonecalls – less central to the making and unmaking of reputations. And the sour mood in many countries towards politicians, big business and the wealthy is making the public less ready to accept that such interest groups are not, as Bell Pottinger would put it, really such bad guys after all. "The most difficult thing now in our business is having an impact," Bell acknowledges. "You have to operate in more and more areas of distribution."

Bell is a professional optimist, but occasionally seems gloomy about the modern world. "I hate the internet," he told the authors Charles Vallance and David Hopper in a recent book on British entrepreneurs, The Branded Gentry. David Cameron does not enthuse him: "I don't know him, and I don't understand him. He's obviously stuck in the Lynton Crosby strategy: be vile, and that'll do." Of course, this may be a piece of pragmatic positioning, as Cameron's chances of re-election begin to diminish. When I ask about Ed Miliband, Bell says brightly: "He's obviously very clever, and has done some smart things." But he goes on to praise George Osborne for his "clear" free-market thinking. For all Bell's gut political feelings, Hollingsworth's biography shows he has long been willing to play situations both ways. In 1985 he told Media Week magazine: "I want the BBC to fail"; a month later, he took on the contract to do their advertising.

At Bell Pottinger, clients with opposing interests are assigned separate PR teams, and the situation is kept manageable and ethical – at least by Bell Pottinger's standards – by internal "Chinese walls". Clients are always informed when the firm is representing a rival, says Henderson, but few walk away. Bell Pottinger's ease with conflicts of interest, like its readiness to represent dubious clients, is easy to find chilling; but to detail and condemn it can act as a form of free advertising: there will always be people in the world who want an unsqueamish PR firm. Likewise any article that portrays Bell Pottinger as having tentacles everywhere: "I'm delighted to have people think we have a finger in every pie," says Henderson, finally smiling. "Because that's our objective!"

In truth, both Bell Pottinger and their critics often overstate the firm's power. Henderson claims its work for Cuadrilla has "completely changed the whole debate" about fracking. It doesn't quite feel like that. Nor does it feel like world opinion has softened much over the decades towards Bell Pottinger's contentious government clients. In April, PR Week reported that the firm had "annual revenues [in] the mid/high £30m mark" – high for a company with 250 employees, but modest compared with other rightwing media players such as Rupert Murdoch.

Yet for Bell at least, precisely measuring the effect of Bell Pottinger's work – even if that were possible in the infinitely subjective world of PR – is probably not the point. "I don't think he's ever been interested in being [part of] a big PR conglomerate," says biographer Hollingsworth. "His life is about the buzz."

Outside his top-floor office, the sun has gone in and a grey winter afternoon is settling over Mayfair. Our interview is past the hour and a half mark, yet Bell is still spinning tirelessly. "My interest is in high-profile news," he says, unleashing another smile. "It's nice to be part of what's going on." On the pavement below, the police officers outside the Saudi embassy pace up and down with their machine guns.

Marketing & PRMargaret ThatcherAndy Beckett
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The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes by Patrick Keiller – review

With his streak of nostalgia and distinctive tone, Patrick Keiller offers a worldly and compelling view of Britain's built environment

Early on in this enigmatic, intermittently brilliant collection of essays about the built landscape of Britain and how it has changed in the last 30 years, there is a quote from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray: "The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."

The sentence is as close as Patrick Keiller comes to a manifesto. It also appears in one of the films that made his longstanding cult reputation, Robinson in Space, a 1997 travelogue that turned wide, static shots of car factories, supermarkets and container ports, often seen from a distance or through fences, into a menacingly beautiful portrait of a Britain that is both bleaker and more powerful than we usually think. In another essay here, Keiller tries to explain the power of his footage. "The slightest sense of hyper-reality in the pictures seemed to be enough to unmask their subjects," he writes, "especially if one stared at them a bit."

Despite the ever-swelling crowd of psychogeographers, urbexers, urbanists and architectural polemicists currently nosing around British cities – and London in particular – Keiller remains distinct. Jonathan Meades might be fiercer, Iain Sinclair more atmospheric, Owen Hatherley more romantic, but Keiller often appears the worldliest and most penetrating. This brief book, an initially haphazard-seeming pile of offcuts bundling together contributions to esoteric journals and academic volumes from 1982 to 2010, is studded with deadpan insights that are sharp as nails.

"The UK's most extensive indigenous high-technology industry is weaponry," states a brief passage on how the decline of British manufacturing has been overstated. Another eye-opening paragraph points out that "the road system" functions "as a publicly funded warehouse" for big business, jammed with "goods vehicles moving or parked". A longer piece on the British home, first published in 1998, foresees the present housing crisis: "Under advanced capitalism it is increasingly difficult to produce and maintain the dwelling." His explanation is typically ambitious: "The dominant narratives of modernity – as mobility and instant communication – appear to be about work and travel, not home."

The earliest couple of essays here are too chewy, fibrous with literary and film theory. They were written when Keiller was an earnest young experimental film-maker, keen to show off his cosmopolitanism and broad learning, and yet to find one voice beyond the standard academic. But by the mid-90s, when he entered his 40s, he had developed a distinctive tone both on the page and in the voiceovers for his films: patrician, self‑consciously formal, even fogeyish, yet with an edge – sometimes droll, sometimes melancholy, sometimes simultaneously horrified and awestruck by the post-Thatcher Britain he was describing. "As we felt ourselves losing ground, both politically and economically," he writes, "our sense of loss was partly mollified by observing … changes in the detail of the landscape, as spectators at some sporting event might watch the opposition winning."

Keiller was and is on the left, has a streak of nostalgia, and often prefers continental Europe to Britain. In the mid-90s, at the fag end of 18 years of Tory rule and with the country shabby in its public amenities – think of the injury-prone London underground then – yet also crassly gleaming with new private-sector edifices, Keiller's elegant disdain fitted the times. His first wider success, the 1994 documentary London, by turns painterly and grumpy, concerned itself with "the problem" of the capital – in his view, its lack of charisma and of functionality compared to other European cities.

That stance looks too pessimistic now. So does a 2003 dismissal here of "many aspects of English visual and material culture … its inability to produce adequately designed buildings, cars and other consumer goods … its unattractive food". Judging by the slivers of tight-lipped memoir he inserts in the book, Keiller has spent most of the last few decades living in London, but he only grudgingly concedes that the city "seems" to have become "more enjoyable" since the early 90s. Yet characteristically his sternness about the elderly, still half-tatty capital leads to a fresh and counterintuitive thought: "New built environments are usually less socially and economically diverse than older urban fabric, so perhaps the fluidity of London's population is encouraged by this physical stasis."

Keiller does not conduct any interviews to test or explore his thesis. Nor do other voices feature much elsewhere in the book. Most of the time this doesn't matter – he is compelling and authoritative company, switching expertly between description, deep historical perspective, and telling socioeconomic statistics. But, as with his fellow city-explorers and explainers – all of these authors men, possibly significantly – there are moments when the book becomes too much of a monologue. And the emphasis on looking at things rather than talking to people is better at creating vivid panoramas on the page than following the intricacies of social change, which anyway are increasingly hidden from public view in the digital age.

Unusually and refreshingly for the genre, Keiller reflects on some of the limits of his approach. "The meaning in the landscape resides only in the imagination of whoever looks upon it," he writes in an early essay. Elsewhere, in the best and most barbed piece in the book, first published in 2000, he attacks psychogeography itself – then in the early stages of its literary journey from eccentricity to orthodoxy – for its lack of political ambition: "In the UK … we can't rebuild the public transport system, or re-empower local democracy, but we can poeticise our relationship with their dilapidation." Despite living in a country that has generated immense wealth in recent decades, Keiller suggests, we have done too much interesting thinking about buildings and not enough actual building. He admits that he originally wanted to be an architect himself, "but for a number of reasons was unable to".

One consequence of his and others' failure to build, he continues, is a British preference for re-using neighbourhoods and buildings rather than properly modernising them. "In London now, psychogeography leads not so much to avant-garde architecture" – as the school of thought's 1960s French orginators intended – "as to gentrification." I don't think even the coolest estate agents are going to be handing out Keiller texts just yet.

EssaysSocietyArchitectureAndy Beckett
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How the Daily Mail's attack on the Milibands may define Labour leader

By confronting the Mail's editor-in-chief Paul Dacre, Ed Miliband has turned an ugly story into a pivotal political moment

Of the many startling elements to this week's protracted, unpredictable, Tory party conference-spoiling, possibly pivotal confrontation between Ed Miliband and the most politically self-confident newspapers in Britain, perhaps the most startling is that it took so long to happen.

For more than a decade, Miliband has been a rising Labour figure with a well-documented family backstory featuring a famous Marxist. An exhaustive biography of his father, Ralph Miliband – a book so selectively, strainingly used by the Mail last Saturday to claim that the late political scientist was "The man who hated Britain" – was published by Michael Newman in 2002.

And as Labour leader for the last three years, Ed has shifted his party haltingly but unmistakably leftwards, the first leader to attempt this Mail-baiting manoeuvre since Michael Foot. Foot was savaged beyond recovery by the Mail and the rest of the rightwing press in the early 1980s. But the Mail has been running lethal stories about the British left for much longer. Eighty-nine years ago this month, under the headline "Moscow orders to our Reds: great plot disclosed", it published the infamous Zinoviev letter, later shown to be a forgery, suggesting subversive forces were at work in the Labour party. Four days after the story ran, the first-ever Labour government was thrown out of power.

Since Miliband became leader, the paper has treated him with almost continuous, escalating hostility. He was "Red Ed" in its very first headline announcing he had won the leadership. In the days leading up to last Saturday's attack on his father, this effort by the paper to define Ed as unacceptably leftwing intensified. On 25 September, its front page summarised his mildly anti-corporate Labour conference speech as "Back to the bad old days: Red Ed revives 70s Socialism".

Inside, spun out across two pages, was a brief claim by Graeme Leach, chief economist of the Institute of Directors, about a proposal in the speech that developers be compelled to use rather than hoard land. This policy was comparable, said the paper, in a paraphrase of Leach's views, to "Joseph Stalin's notorious seizure of land from prosperous Russians known as the Kulaks."

The following day, largely unnoticed, the Mail published what now seems a dress rehearsal for its monstering of Ralph Miliband. An article headlined "[Ed] Miliband's Marxist father and the real reason he wants to drag us back to the nightmare 70s", by the rightwing historian and regular Mail contributor Dominic Sandbrook, argued that the Labour leader's overall political aim, "to roll back Thatcherism", was "just as his Marxist father would have wanted".

Sandbrook also compared Miliband's plan to fix energy prices to Britain's state-run price commissions in the 1970s, institutions "that seemed [then] like something from a Soviet tractor co-operative". A tenuous, but potentially wounding, connection between Ed and Ralph Miliband's political goals and Britain's great cold war enemy was made.

But perhaps not fiercely enough for the Mail. Two days later came the now notorious article, this time written by the highly-trusted staff journalist Geoffrey Levy. It took much of Westminster by surprise. Most political reporters were focused on the Conservatives, not Labour, with the Tory conference starting the next day. Miliband himself was at his mother's house in north London with his wife and children, getting some respite after his own party conference. Miliband's mother, Marion Kozak, is a lifelong leftwing activist like her late husband, and hers is not a Mail-reading household. Her son did not know about the piece until one of his staff called him.

"We've always been aware that Ralph's views might be used against Ed," says a Miliband aide. "But we were taken aback. There are lines that you don't cross. Ed responded first and foremost as a son. It wasn't based on any political calculation. It wasn't [us] trying to screw up the Tory conference. This is not a battle we picked, and not at a time we would have chosen."

And yet, the aide is also keen to emphasise something else: that as the row has grown, and generated an equally raw controversy – over the appearance of a Mail on Sunday reporter at a private memorial service for Miliband's uncle on Wednesday, seeking comments on its sister paper's portrayal of Ralph Miliband – so the affair has become about more than a son defending his dead father's reputation.

"Ed has touched a chord," says the aide. He says the Labour leader has received more than 16,000 supportive messages, "our highest number of responses ever to a topic Ed has raised in one of his leader's emails". Meanwhile, a striking, ever-widening range of other voices have publicly condemned the Mail: from Tory grandees such as Michael Heseltine to Billy Bragg; from Lord Sugar to the Bishop of Bradford; from Tim Montgomerie, the usually Miliband-deriding founder of the Tory website ConservativeHome, to the Mail's own readers, many of whom have been unexpectedly defending a dead Marxist on the online version of the paper's comment threads.

"What you've seen is a lot of people who've watched the Mail papers use this [style of journalism], on them or on others, thinking, 'Thank God someone's got the balls to stand up to them,'" says Miliband's aide. He has a point. There is a sense at the moment of decades of pent-up anti-Mail feelings being released – not least by a Labour party which, since the 1990s, has either tried to cosy up to the papers or endured their barbs in silence. On Newsnight on Tuesday, when a finger-pointing, almost breathless Alastair Campbell told the Daily Mail's deputy editor, Jon Steafel, that his absent boss, Paul Dacre, was "a bully and a coward", and that his paper was "the worst of British values posing as the best", the former New Labour spin doctor looked more exhilarated and satisfied than he has in public in years.

But behind this week's compelling battle about the Mail titles' methods and influence, looms an even bigger one: about political legitimacy. The essence of the Mail's charge against Ralph Miliband is that, despite his dogged attachment to freedom of speech and democracy, and fierce doubts about Soviet communism – political traits the Mail has minimised or ignored – his Marxism and hostility to the traditional British establishment made him "antipathetic to British values", as Steafel slightly menacingly put it.

The same goes for the Labour leader, says the paper. Miliband's "own Marxist values can be seen all too clearly," stated an unrepentant Mail editorial on Tuesday. Along with his policies on energy prices and land use, it cited his "determination to place the British Press under statutory control", an issue which is due to be discussed by MPs next week. "If he crushes the freedom of the Press … he will have driven a hammer and sickle through the heart of the nation so many of us genuinely love."

Calling those who question the free market and the usual distribution of power in Britain alien and unpatriotic has always been one of the Mail's most effective tactics. Even at the modest zenith of the British left in the 1970s, the reputations of many union leaders, and of the mildly reformist Labour PM Harold Wilson, were steadily eroded by heavy hints and blunt allegations from rightwing politicians and commentators that they were foreign stooges.

The Mail's recent treatment of the Milibands comes amid a broader assault on the Labour leader, which has been building all year in the rightwing press and the Tory party. David Cameron may have supported Miliband against the Mail this week – not the happiest task for an opposing party leader amid his own annual conference – but he did so on the narrowest, least political grounds: that a son had the right to defend his father.

The conference speech that Cameron delivered the next day was full of anti-Miliband phrases that might have come straight from the Mail, warning against "Red Ed", his "1970s-style socialism" and "damaging, nonsensical, twisted economic policy". This kind of Tory rhetoric, rarely heard in the more conciliatory early years of Cameron's leadership, will almost certainly continue and grow in volume until the 2015 general election – regardless of how the row over the language used by the Mail papers against the Milibands turns out.

Meanwhile, the Labour leader's own partisan point-scoring has acquired a harder edge, such as his conference claim that Cameron was "strong at standing up to the weak". His steadily bolder counter-attack against the Mail papers has taken a similar approach. Yesterday, a Miliband spokesman told the Guardian, "These newspapers are not upholding the values and decency of the British people." Miliband then demanded that the owner of the Mail titles, Lord Rothermere, launch an inquiry into their "culture and practices", as if the papers were a den of secretive extremists.

Some critics of the Daily Mail, not confined to Labour, have long seen the paper in exactly those terms. Dacre, 64, has been its editor for 21 years. In private, he is polite, fastidious, unflashily prosperous – you might almost mistake him for a senior lawyer or accountant. But in the Mail's gladiatorial newsroom, where he often spends over a dozen hours a day, he is "a loud-mouthed tyrant", he told the British Journalism Review, with relish, in a rare interview in 2002. Dacre is a man of great certainty, and he divides the world into people he approves of and people he does not.

The Milibands are the latter. The Labour leader's camp say they are not intimidated. "This [row] is like Syria and Rupert Murdoch," says the aide. "Once again, Ed's breaking the rules." For all his mildness, he is a disruptive politician, most effective and engaged when shaking things up. He is not a Marxist as the Mail alleges – he wants to reform capitalism, not abolish it – but in his willingness to take on institutions such as the Mail, he is the sort of Labour leader his father might grudgingly have approved of.

And like Dacre, Miliband is stubborn. One of his heroes is the limpet-like England batsman Geoffrey Boycott. It is even possible that Miliband will outlast Dacre, who is employed on a one-year contract. Rothermere still reportedly values his editor highly, but lower down the Mail food chain, out of Dacre's eyeline, there has been dismay and weariness this week that the editor may, for once, have bitten off more than he can chew. And there has been another emotion, too. When Dacre's deputy was desperately trying to hold the line against Alastair Campbell on Newsnight on Tuesday, a source at the Mail tells me: "There was laughter."

Ed MilibandDaily MailRalph MilibandNewspapersNewspapers & magazinesNational newspapersPaul DacreMail on SundayAssociated NewspapersDaily Mail & General TrustPress intrusionPrivacy & the mediaAndy Beckett
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What is the 'global race'?

Conservatives love to talk about the 'global race' – but what does it really mean? And is Ed Miliband right to say that that David Cameron's party have taken the concept in a dangerous direction?

A year ago, when the government was more drifting and unpopular than it is now, a short, fierce book was published by five young Tory MPs. "The British are among the worst idlers in the world," claimed Britannia Unchained. "As the world becomes more competitive, Britain will have to work harder to keep up."

A debate about the "idlers" charge briefly boiled in radio phone-ins and newspaper columns. But within a few weeks attention had moved on. References to the book dwindled. From its policy-wonk subtitle, "Global lessons for growth and prosperity", to its headachy statistical tables, Britannia Unchained seemed of specialist interest only – just another Westminster pamphlet.

Except that, starting at last year's Conservative party conference, there were signs that the book was on to something. The first came in the speech by George Osborne, which suddenly shifted from his usual cheap but nimble party point-scoring to a more ambitious, international argument: "Western democracies," he said, "are being outworked, outcompeted and outsmarted by new economies … And the truth is, some western countries won't keep up, they won't make the changes needed … They'll fall further and further behind."

Two days later, in his leader's address, David Cameron made the metaphor explicit: "We are in a global race today … How will we come through it? It's not complicated. Hard work."

Dominic Raab, one of the authors of Britannia Unchained, is not quite prepared to claim credit for supplying Cameron and Osborne with what, belatedly, may be one of their few persuasive governing themes. "We had quite a lot of interest in the book from across the backbenches, and from various people in and out of government," he says, perhaps mindful of sometimes being tipped in Westminster as a future Tory star. "But it did occur to me, as I sat there at conference, listening to the speeches, that some of what we had written had … resonated."

Last September, the phrase "global race", used in reference to Britain, appeared twice in British national newspapers. In October, 17 times; in November, 38; in December, 65. Usage has barely dipped since. Much of it has been by Cameron himself: in his 2013 New Year message; in a party political broadcast in March; in set-piece speeches to business conferences; in more informal remarks to journalists; even, slightly bafflingly, in a speech in July to promote to the world the British legislative approach to same-sex marriage.

Almost every other senior Conservative has also caught what the Daily Telegraph parliamentary sketchwriter Michael Deacon calls "global race fever": from ultra-loyalists such as the education secretary Michael Gove and party chairman Grant Shapps to loose cannons such as Michael Heseltine and Ken Clarke, from usually measured Tory thinkers such as David Willetts to the loosest cannon of all, Boris Johnson. Further down the Tory food chain, "the global race" theme pervades strategy meetings about how the Conservatives plan to present themselves, both at their party conference and at the 2015 general election.

Rushed into use shortly after the 2012 Olympics, by a party whose key figures went to expensive schools that fetishise sport and general competitiveness, "the global race" is hardly the most subtle or socially sensitive of rhetorical devices. But it has the advantage of flexibility. Britain, the Tories tell us, needs to "win" it, "succeed" in it, and get "to the top" in it; "compete" in it, "thrive in" it, and be "strong" in it; "fight" in it; or merely, "equip" itself for it and "get fit for" it. If Britain fails to do some or all of these things, it will "sink", "lose", "fall behind", be left in "the slow lane", or let "others take over".

This race, we are told, is economic. Our opponents are usually specified: the rising countries of Asia and South America such as China, India and Brazil. Yet the prize is vaguely and promiscuously defined: "jobs", "wealth", "growth", "trade", "talent", "technology", "skills", "capital", "competitiveness", "big ideas", "influence", "innovation", "investment", "investment opportunities", "recovery".

Meanwhile the race is invoked to justify seemingly any government goal or policy: bigger British arms sales abroad and smaller school holidays; tighter immigration controls and looser planning laws; the lavish high-speed rail project HS2 and a leaner Whitehall; harder GCSEs and better childcare; reducing social security and reforming the European Union; promoting the renewable energy industry and the redevelopment of Battersea power station; even dignifying Cameron's recent visit to Kazakhstan.

With its portentousness, official ubiquity and obviousness as a metaphor, "the global race" could almost be a catchphrase from The Thick Of It or Yes, Minister. Especially when politicians mix it with other grandiose metaphors, as Cameron did at last year's Tory conference: "A global race … means an hour of reckoning for countries like ours. Sink or swim. Do or decline."

And yet, the phrase is beginning to embed itself in modern politics – more effectively than Cameron's previous, cuddlier concept, "the big society". The phrase has spread far, too, through the machinery of British government. This is from the official blog of Scott Wightman, British ambassador to South Korea: "Education … is really the only way that a developed country can keep up in the global race for prosperity. In Korea, education is at the heart of how this country has transformed itself …"

The underlying implication of the global race idea – that the world is getting harsher and Britons should toughen up accordingly – seems to fit these unforgiving times, with zero-hours work contracts and punitive public attitudes to welfare claimants.

"There is a lot of fear at the moment," says TUC economist Nicola Smith, "and the small-state, deregulatory part of the Tory party is using 'the global race' idea to try to exploit it." One of her rightwing counterparts, Philip Booth of the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs, also sees a potency to the global race metaphor: "It plays on the idea in people's minds that British manufacturing is in decline. And it plays to the business support for the Tory party – to people who are engaged, say, in the day-to-day business of undercutting a German car company."

Nationalism, declinism, insecurity, acceptance of diminished wages and working conditions, a certain puritanism – Britain has been exhibiting these classic symptoms of difficult economic periods for half a decade now. Focus groups organised by the Conservatives have reportedly shown that voters with these feelings are receptive to "global race" rhetoric. As Raab puts it: "Do we want to be Greece in 40, 50 years' time?" It will probably take more than a few months of better economic news to make this underlying fear go away.

Besides, talk of a more competitive world is not just Tory scaremongering. "We're moving into much more bracing times," says Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules the World and former editor of Marxism Today. "For a very long time, the west was extremely privileged, by privileged access to commodities during colonial times, for example." The left-leaning American economist Robert Reich, labor secretary under Bill Clinton, sees international competition "intensifying". Jacques says the solution for Britain, if there is one, will not be comfortable: "I do think that kids don't work nearly hard enough. It's no use ordering them [to]. You have to create a new mentality."

But haven't we been here before? Fifty years ago this autumn, Harold Wilson, then an eager young Labour leader and prime minister-in-waiting, made a famous speech to his party conference. "There is no more dangerous illusion than the comfortable doctrine that the world owes us a living," he said. "From now on, Britain will have just as much influence in the world as we can earn … We must use … all the energies and skills of our people … We shall need a totally new attitude."

Since the 60s, Labour prime ministers have been just as keen as Conservative ones to tell Britons to pull their socks up. "[The] forces of change driving the future don't stop at national boundaries," Tony Blair warned another party conference in 1999. "Fail to develop the talents of any one person, we fail Britain." In 2008, Gordon Brown wrote in the Observer that "winning the global race to the top" would require the "unlocking [of] all of the talent of all of the people".

The Blair and Brown governments aimed to prepare Britons to cope with globalisation through increased state spending on education, employment training and childcare. "Government has an essential role to play in investing in the human resources ... needed to develop an entrepreneurial culture," wrote the New Labour guru Anthony Giddens, with a whiff of Whitehall-knows-best, in his influential 1998 book The Third Way. One of the origins of this approach was a UN strategy called "social development", which for decades had aimed to increase the economic "capacities" of citizens of poor countries. The implication that Britain was now a developing country, too, at least in its population's preparedness for globalisation, was not dwelled on by Giddens and other New Labour thinkers.

Under Blair and Brown, the actual phrase "the global race" was rarely used by British politicians, but it gradually became a favoured concept on the business pages of rightwing newspapers, especially the Times. Then the coalition took office, and New Labour's free-spending response to the global race was abandoned in favour of the Conservatives' much more austere one, which argues that globalisation requires less investment in Britons – cuts in workers' rights and welfare– rather than more.

"I don't see it as about making Britain a sweatshop," insists Raab. "We have a shrinking share of the populace pedalling harder and harder. Those are the guys whose side we're on." When I ask him whether the government should offer Britons carrots as well as sticks to make them perform better in the global race, there is a long pause. Then he offers more stick: "Education and retirement are being spun out for longer" – that situation, he implies, cannot go on. "Unless we're in a position to compete, the raw truth is we will not produce the kind of jobs we want, and the tax revenue the public sector requires. Our economy will become unsustainable."

Some analysts consider such talk pessimistic. Interestingly, critics of the whole global race idea are not confined to the left. "Economists don't think of trade as a race in any way," says Booth. "The world economy is not a zero-sum game. Countries get richer together. If China carries on reforming and growing, there will be more opportunities there for Britain." Reich agrees: "The race needn't [mean that] every country's citizens lose ground, but some lose more than others … or [that] some can gain only at the expense of others … We can all grow, and at the same time spread prosperity to more people."

He points out that it is increasingly irrelevant to think of global competition in terms of national economies anyway: most big corporations are multinational archipelagos of employees and share holdings. Jacques sees a similar over-simplification in how China is often presented as the global race's great bogeyman. Wages in the top cities there are rising fast, he says; Chinese manufacturing is moving upmarket; and the Chinese state is intimately involved in many of the country's major businesses. None of this suggests that the sole route to economic success is, as the British government's global race rhetoric often implies, simply for citizens to work harder for less while the state steps aside.

Recently, the TUC and Labour have tried to redefine the race as one for better wages and skills and living standards, rather than "a race to the bottom". Ed Miliband has attacked Cameron on the issue in the Observer: "He thinks for Britain to win the global race people have to lose." Yet as often with Labour under Miliband, this effort to change the terms of the debate has been sporadic and as yet has had limited effect. As Reich puts it, in Britain and other rich countries, "creating a 'favourable business environment' remains tantamount to deregulating, reducing wages, cutting taxes on corporations, and giving employers more flexibility to fire at will." Even in Germany, often rightfully cited by the left as taking a different, more socially benign approach to globalisation, the strong economic performance over the past decade has involved a prolonged squeeze on wages.

For now at least, the greatest threat to the government's "global race" argument may be over-use and ridicule. At Conservative party HQ, those working on the 2015 general election campaign are reportedly already sick of the phrase. And in a politician-hating age, a Tory party without great orators or much of a mandate to govern deploys catchphrases – remember "we're all in this together" – at its peril.

In the meantime, global race sceptics may enjoy a half-minute film shot last year in St James's Park and posted on YouTube. It is of George Osborne trying to look comfortable jogging. Those wanting to make Britain lean and mean should perhaps start at the top.

Economic policyEconomicsManufacturing sectorConservativesLabourAndy Beckett
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Tony Abbott at Oxford: fighter, networker, Thatcherite

Twenty-two months in England transformed the beer-swilling, rugby song-singing chameleon – and gave him a new hero

In the Oxford university rugby team in the autumn of 1981, there was a loosehead prop with a mixed reputation.

"He was a good scrummager," says Phil Crowe, the captain at the time. "He could scrounge on the ground for the ball. He did all the technical things pretty well."

In confrontations, he never took a backward step. Sometimes he took a forward one: if an opposing player was giving him a hard time, and the referee wasn't looking, "He was a bit of a pugilist. He had a quick right jab."

But he had his limitations. "Around the field, he wasn't all that flash. He was never going to be a sprinter."

Heavy in the shoulders and 14 or 15 stone, depending on how much training he had been doing and how much beer he had been drinking, he was an awkward fit in an Oxford side that based its game on speed and mobility.

In December 1981, just before the all-important annual Varsity Match against Cambridge, participation in which earned a Blue, he was dropped. "He was very emotional," remembers an Oxford friend. He never played rugby for the Oxford first team again.

Three decades later, as the leader of Australia's rightwing Coalition, one of the country's most prominent Anglophiles and the favourite to be prime minister after the 7 September federal election, Tony Abbott is long accustomed to describing his Oxford days in glowing terms.

"They were extraordinarily rich and golden beyond belief," he told the current affairs programme Sunday in 2001. "Someone once said that Oxford left you magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life ...

"At Oxford you are amongst the best young men and women of your generation in the English-speaking world, and that's a tremendous privilege."

Last December, Abbott told an audience at his old Oxford college, Queen's, "I hope I will always keep an Oxford cast of mind."

He was a student there from October 1981 to July 1983, between the ages of 23 and 25. A Rhodes scholar, part of a production line for world leaders established by the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, he studied politics and philosophy and got "a solid second".

He played a lot of sport, won a Blue for boxing and returned to Australia with his Anglophilia reinforced. Little else about these 22 months has been established – in contrast to his highly scrutinised and often contentious existence before and after.

Yet all his biographers agree that Oxford was important to him, possibly pivotal. What exactly was his life there like?

Abbott had been born in England. His father, Dick, grew up in a village near Newcastle. During the second world war, Dick riskily emigrated to Australia by boat – like many later, less welcomed foreigners.

Through the 40s and 50s, Abbott's father moved itchily back and forth between the two countries, eventually giving up an ambition to be a Catholic priest to become a dentist. In 1957 he married an Australian, Fay, and she gave birth to Tony in London the same year.

In 1960 the family moved to Australia for good. According to Abbott's early biographer Michael Duffy, "Tony Abbott's first memory is of the steam train that took them from London to Southampton, where they boarded for the six-week voyage."

Settling in Sydney, Dick grew successful and wealthy. Tony was an adored only son with three younger sisters. He followed an increasingly pressured route through ambitious Jesuit schools to grand, Oxford-influenced Sydney university.

There he made himself probably the most famous – or infamous – student activist in the country, leading an aggressive rightwing revolt against the leftwing campus orthodoxies of the late 70s.

There were allegations against him of physically threatening behaviour – punching a wall on either side of the head of a rival student politician, Barbara Ramjam; and of sexual harassment – groping an activist, Helen Wilson, while she was speaking at a meeting.

After the latter incident, Abbott was charged with indecent and common assault, said he had "tapped her on the back, about the level of her jeans belt", and was acquitted. This month Ramjam received an apology from News Corp Australia, which had claimed that her account of the former episode was fictitious.

By the end of the 70s, the campus was screaming with anti-Abbott graffiti. He also believed, erroneously as it turned out, that he had fathered a child. Knowing that two of his many, jostling ambitions – becoming a priest and applying for a Rhodes scholarship – were not open to parents, he had split up with the mother and the baby had been adopted. In Sydney, Abbott was feeling increasingly hemmed in.

Then, in late 1980, he won his scholarship to Oxford. "A Rhodes" was supposed to have sporting as well as intellectual and leadership ability, and at Sydney he had played rugby keenly, sometimes for the first team.

A long line of successful Rhodes applicants from the university had done the same. His campus notoriety was no secret to the scholarship judging panel – figures from Sydney's conservative establishment – but his rightwing politics were not a million miles from theirs and, besides, he had a seductive ability to admit fault and promise to do better.

"The most Catholic thing about this profoundly Catholic man," writes his latest biographer, David Marr, "is his faith in absolution. The slate can always be wiped clean."

Oxford offered a fresh start. Abbott felt he could ignore many of the expectations that had built up around him in Australia and reinvent himself. At Oxford, at least to start with, almost no one had heard of him or his Sydney antics.

"He was put in a much larger pond, where there was a huge amount of indifference to him," says Norman O'Bryan, an Oxford friend and one of seven other 1981 Australian Rhodes scholars in a university of 20,000 students.

Oxford also appeared to be the kind of England that the deeply conservative Abbott idealised, ever since his mother bought him Ladybird books about Francis Drake and Henry V as a child. Ancient, resilient, ritualised, the university aroused what he described at Queen's last year as his "instinctive respect for values and institutions that have stood the test of time".

In 1981 his college was 640 years old: almost five times older than Sydney university. With its honey-coloured quadrangles, complete with towers and colonnades and roof statues, sited right in the medieval heart of the university, Queen's looked like a dream of Oxford made real.

Abbott quickly started spending time in the Middle Common Room, a handsome social space for graduate students. A contemporary remembers him "sitting in an armchair, legs slung across, holding court, pleased with himself".

Abbott's actual living quarters were a little different. Like many of the foreign students at Queen's, he was accommodated a 10-minute walk away, on the edge of less-exquisite east Oxford, in the Florey Building, an angular 60s fishbowl that looks like a Martian spaceship cut in half.

Roger Mastalir, a US Rhodes scholar, was one of the other residents. He recalls endless struggles with window blinds to get privacy and the correct temperature, but also a close Florey community.

"I remember discussions about Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, Hinduism. Tony was willing to talk to anyone about anything. He could be aggressive when debating – 'tell me why you think that' – but I don't recall him ever being belittling.

"He tried to soak up as much as possible. He was not afraid to try anything."

At Oxford, Abbott did not look that charismatic. Heavier-set than he is now, he wore middle-aged trousers and V-necked jumpers with out-of-date, 70s-style shirt collars poking out. His voice was a little tight and needling.

But he was loud and good fun. "He was a larger-than-life Aussie Ocker," says Crowe. "Beer-drinking, rugby song-singing, thick accent."

The other Australian Rhodes scholars avoided playing to the stereotype but "Abbo" embraced it. "You could hear him from across the room," says another Oxford contemporary. "Abbo always liked to stir the pot and say outrageous things."

Half-jokingly, he told the college's Anglican chaplain that he ought to have chosen Catholicism instead. On this and other occasions, some at Queen's felt Abbott "went over the top a bit", says Brian McGuinness, a philosophy tutor there.

Like Sydney university in the 70s, Oxford in the early 80s had a vigorous leftwing culture: even the gilded student magazine Isis ran articles about the horror of nuclear weapons.

Although the provost of Queen's was Lord Blake, a renowned Tory historian and supporter of the prime minister Margaret Thatcher, its students consistently voted Labour in university elections.

Abbott's politics stood out: "He loved Maggie Thatcher," says Crowe. "He was even more conservative than he is now."

In May 1982, six days after the British sinking of the Argentinian warship General Belgrano, with 323 killed, an Oxford demonstration took place against Thatcher's military campaign in the Falklands. Hundreds of chanting students and locals, led by chained figures made up as corpses, converged on the Martyrs' Memorial, a traditional gathering place for protesters.

Abbott hurriedly scraped together a dozen fellow rightwingers from Queen's, rushed to the memorial, and mounted a counter-demonstration in favour of the British war effort. Provocatively, he stood beside the peace protesters, one hand in his pocket, bellowing pro-Thatcher slogans.

Eventually, the university newspaper Cherwell reported, there were "police attempts to disperse [his] unofficial meeting", but these "met with little response".

Abbott's stubbornness and cheek were vindicated: his stunt received almost as much press coverage as the pacifists.

Yet he was not loud all the time. Oxford university is full of separate worlds and, then as now, Abbott kept his different sides – Ocker and Anglophile, political wild man and lover of order – carefully compartmentalised.

Half-hidden down a side street, well away from Queen's, Campion Hall is a small institution for Jesuits, not a college but a discreet part of the university. "Tony used to spend a large amount of time there," says O'Bryan, who too had been Jesuit-educated in Australia.

Abbott talked to O'Bryan and other Oxford Catholic friends about becoming a priest. They thought the prospect unlikely, but recognised the seriousness and old-fashionedness of his faith. "I remember him saying the Catholic Church went downhill when mass started being said in English instead of Latin," says one.

At Campion Hall, Abbott's frequent companion was Paul Mankowski, a devout American Jesuit. Mankowski, now an influential Catholic conservative with a busy intellectual life in the US, Australia and Italy, declined to be interviewed for this article.

At Oxford in the early 80s, he was already an intriguingly austere figure. He had taken a vow of poverty and wore the clothes of dead priests.

The young, questing Australian was lastingly impressed: "Mankowski," he wrote with feeling in his autobiography, Battlelines, 28 years later, "was both the embodiment of muscular Christianity and fully acquainted with the cross tides of modern life ... I doubt that I have ever met a finer man." Abbott still sees him today.

Mankowski boxed for the university. According to Abbott, in January 1982, "after a couple of extra drinks" in one of the many Oxford bars the Australian relished, Mankowski talked him into joining the university boxing club.

Abbott had boxed a little at Sydney but, after one training session in the cold, basic Oxford university gym, Abbott's account goes on, he had second thoughts.

Then Mankowski gave him a new skipping rope for training as a gift. Such generosity from such a poor man persuaded him to persist.

Others suggest less elevated Abbott motives also played a part. He had just been dropped from the rugby team. Getting a Blue – both a burning personal ambition and almost a social requirement in the gregarious, sport-fixated world of the Australian Rhodes scholars – now required other means, and boxing was a shrewd plan B.

"It's the easiest way to get a Blue," says Nicholas Stafford-Deitsch, who became Abbott's sparring partner. "Unlike in other Oxford sports, you could win one as a novice, within months."

Hardly any students had prior boxing experience, and even fewer wanted to win a Blue by getting hit.

That Abbott did has played a large part in his personal mythology ever since. On his website, boxing takes up a third of the space he devotes to Oxford.

As a tightly wound man – perhaps from keeping all his contradictory impulses in balance -– physical exercise has always been a release; and sometimes also a useful form of public machismo.

Yet at Oxford Abbott was not actually a great boxer. A heavyweight then, but of modest height and reach.

"He was crude, with very little technique," says Stafford-Deitsch, then the university's best fighter. "He wasn't a huge puncher. He hardly ever touched me.

"He shut his eyes when he boxed – that meant he was scared. He certainly didn't have the toned physique of the toned athlete. And he was a heavy breather as he started to get tired – another thing an experienced boxer hides."

On 5 March 1982, Abbott made his debut for Oxford, in the Varsity Match against Cambridge. The contest, involving nine pairs of boxers, took place in Oxford town hall: a tight, theatrical auditorium with viewing galleries along three sides.

More than a thousand spectators squeezed in, including some of Abbott's old rugby crowd, with whom, characteristically, he had remained on drinking terms.

As the bouts went by, and the score reached 4-4, Abbott's contest, scheduled last, became the decider. The atmosphere turned increasingly "gladiatorial", Crowe recalls.

Toilet rolls were thrown from the galleries. There was beer in the air and beer on the floor. Even to the experienced Stafford-Deitsch, the crowd seemed "absolutely manic, baying for blood, screaming, 'Get the effing tabs!' ", Oxford slang for Cambridge students.

Abbott's opponent was taller, with a better reach. Crowe remembers "looking at Tony in the ring before his bout. He was clearly shitting himself, sweat dripping off."

As soon as the fight started, Abbott began punching as fast as he could, leaving himself no defence at all. Within 45 seconds, his opponent was down: Abbott had won.

Looking utterly exhausted, mobbed by rugby mates who had clambered into the ring, "Abbo stood ... with a half-smile almost of disbelief," the Oxford Mail reported, in a prominent, ecstatic account of Oxford's 5-4 victory. In a highly status-conscious city and university, Abbott was suddenly a hero.

He exploited his celebrity. In the 1983 Varsity Match, after again winning the decisive bout, he told the Mail: "I just made believe that my opponent was Bob Hawke, the leader of the Australian Labor party."

For all Abbott's boisterousness and likability at Oxford, some who knew him there felt, as one puts it, that underneath, "He was positioning himself for a political career. It was the way he comported himself. He had this air ... of expectation."

Another says, "He would use your name at the end of every sentence. He would look you in the eye and shake your hand. I didn't feel it was terribly genuine."

Then as now, women were less drawn to him than men: "He would do that charm thing, but he would always end up with the blokes, talking about rugby."

No one I interviewed recalled his having a girlfriend at Oxford. Some remembered gossip at the time about his having fathered a child in Sydney, later proved to be inaccurate.

But most agreed that Abbott's English interlude was a relatively relaxed episode in his restless, sometimes pent-up life. "Abbo in Oxford was a happy man, so he was good company," says one Australian Rhodes scholar then. "His complexities were well hidden."

By going to Oxford, he was self-consciously and usefully following the example of a long line of powerful Australians: Rupert Murdoch, Malcolm Fraser, Malcolm Turnbull among them.

"The universities play a crucial role in the education of the elite of modern society," a precocious Abbott had told an Australian Broadcasting Corporation interviewer in March 1979.

At Oxford, as he described last December, he was also able to network for the future: "I first met George Brandis, now the shadow attorney-general; Don Markwell ... director of [the rightwing thinktank] the Menzies Research Centre; and Tom Harley ... a long-term member of the federal executive of the Liberal party."

Markwell remembers Abbott at Oxford as someone with "very worked-through political ideas", including a Cold Warrior's absolute hostility to the Soviet Union.

In 1982, during the long university summer holiday, Brandis ran into Abbott in Oxford. Abbott had just been to Russia to see the place for himself – easy foreign travel was part of Oxford's appeal for Australian Rhodes scholars.

When Brandis asked for his impressions, suggesting that Russia must offer at least some cultural pleasures, Abbott replied, "Mate, it doesn't have a single redeeming feature."

But Markwell also noticed Abbott's ability to be both "utterly authentic" and "a chameleon": "People underestimate how smart he is."

At Oxford, Abbott was freed from the burden of nonstop Australian campus activism; and from fitting his fogeyish politics – hostile to feminism and socialism but also to free markets – into a modern political party. Before Oxford and for half a decade afterwards, he dithered between the Liberals, Labor and the dying, socially conservative Catholic splinter group the Democratic Labour party. At Oxford, he could just bellow for Maggie.

In the summer of 1983, after doing a three-year undergraduate degree on an accelerated basis, as Rhodes scholars often did, he took his finals. Although McGuinness remembers him as "an intelligent chap", Abbott's handwriting was so bad, records Michael Duffy, he was recalled to dictate his essays to a typist.

Abbott was good at getting second chances. The '"solidity'"or otherwise of the second-class degree he achieved is impossible to judge: Oxford did not introduce the distinction between a 2:1 and a 2:2 until three years later.

Summing up his Oxford academic achievements, Blake told him, "Sometimes your robust common sense needs to be tempered with a little philosophic doubt."

Yet in some ways the worldly provost of Queen's misread him. After Oxford, Abbott's self-questioning side reasserted itself. Between 1983 and 1990, in order, he travelled the length of Africa, vaguely pursuing an interest in the British empire and Cecil Rhodes in particular; tried and failed to become a priest at a Catholic seminary in Sydney; tried journalism; ran a concrete plant; and finally came to rest in the Liberal party in the early 90s.

Did Oxford change him? It certainly calmed him down – crucial to the transition from campus hothead to conventional politician. Oxford also deepened his Catholicism and conservatism.

It acquainted him a little with fear and failure, and with greater talents than himself. And it gave him a more modern British role model than Rhodes and his other old-fashioned favourite, Winston Churchill.

Like Abbott, Thatcher went to Oxford. Like him, she seized the leadership of her party. Like him, she was an awkward, aggressive opposition leader whom voters did not warm to.

But she won office and used it ruthlessly. As Abbott indirectly acknowledged: after he got back to Australia from Oxford, Duffy records, he named his old wreck of a car the General Belgrano.

Tony AbbottAustralian election 2013Australian politicsAustraliaAndy Beckett
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1983: Blair's year as much as Thatcher's | Andy Beckett

The story of 1983 isn't quite as the Thatcher-worshippers have it. But it was pivotal for Labour

If you're a Tory, 1983 seems a golden year. It was when Thatcherism stopped being an experiment, with lots of baffling results and exploding test tubes, and instead became the whole laboratory, in which most modern British political ideas were tested.

Government papers from 1983 released on Wednesday by the National Archives are full of Conservative confidence and triumphs. There is a document breathlessly granting "Freedom of the Falkland Islands" to the prime minister, who made her post-victory visit there in January, for her "courageous, steadfast and unyielding leadership". There is anticipation of a showdown with the miners, with Thatcher's press secretary, Bernard Ingham, shrewdly judging that Arthur Scargill's long-feared union was "not irresistible". In the background there is the economy, growing healthily for four quarters for the first time since Thatcher took office in 1979. And, dominating the political foreground, there is the general election result in June: a massively increased Tory majority of 144.

No wonder current Conservative strategists – and Labour ones – are interested in the trajectory of Thatcher's first term. With its arc from unprecedented unpopularity to impregnability, her radical 1979-83 administration is an alluring model for today's Tories, with their big, contentious plans and their poll ratings struggling in the low 30s for years now, but finally inching upwards. Ed Miliband, some bullish Conservatives will tell you, is the reincarnation of Labour's cerebral, disastrously ineffectual early 80s leader Michael Foot.

But 1983 is not quite the inspiring template for the right that conventional Westminster wisdom and some Thatcher-worshipping historians would have you believe. Prominent in today's released papers is the American invasion that October of the Commonwealth territory of Grenada. The Thatcher government was against the operation, but Ronald Reagan, supposedly her ideological soulmate and closest foreign ally, went ahead anyway. Hours before the American tanks rumbled ashore, she wrote that there was "no reason to think that military intervention is likely to take place". An almost identical misjudgment was made by her administration in the weeks leading up to the Argentinian seizure of the Falklands the year before, as some older, less Thatcher-revering Falklanders will remind you.

Britain's subservience to America was one postwar orthodoxy that her otherwise iconoclastic, loudly nationalist government was not prepared to challenge. The problems this generated pervade the 1983 documents. At Greenham Common the deployment of American cruise missiles helped create a potent and mischievous new pacifist-feminist politics, which Thatcher tried to play down to the Americans as an "eccentricity", but which became the hub of a national movement huge and vigorous enough to spook her ministers. Similarly, the fascinatingly apocalyptic Queen's speech drafted by civil servants in 1983, for broadcast in the event of imminent Russian nuclear attack, was a consequence, in a sense, of Britain housing too many American military bases.

The limits to Tory dominance in 1983 show themselves in the papers in other ways. David Owen, then a key SDP figure, is a recurring presence – the Thatcherite "hegemony", as helplessly admiring leftwing theorists liked to call it, depended to a large degree on a split left. The Lib Dems no longer take support from Labour in the same way.

In 1983, it is rarely noted, the Conservative vote went down, by nearly 700,000. For all the freshness and energy of Thatcherism in 1979-83, for all the talk then and since that it was the only possible solution to Britain's problems at the end of the 70s, a large majority of Britons remained unconverted. If a similar erosion of the Tory vote happens in 2015, as seems likely, we will probably get prime minister Miliband.

And even the common notion that 1983 represented an economic turnaround crumbles on closer inspection. The economy shrank again in the middle of 1984, and grew erratically in 1985. The great Thatcher boom of a hundred double-breasted, big-mobile-phone documentaries did not arrive until 1986, and lasted barely two and a half years.

All the way through, at least one future British leader was watching and learning from Thatcher's brittle ascendancy. Not Cameron, but a Labour one: at the 1983 election, Tony Blair became an MP. It is an event unrecorded by these papers, as far as I can see. Official documents only tell you so much.

Margaret ThatcherTony BlairConservativesLabourAndy Beckett
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Margaret Thatcher by Charles Moore; Not for Turning by Robin Harris – review

As in the utilities she privatised, competition among Thatcher's biographers hasn't produced much choice for consumers, argues Andy Beckett, but there is new material and a new honesty

How much more is there to say about Margaret Thatcher? That these biographies have the same phrase in their title is not a promising start. Nor is it a title – taken from one of her most self-mythologising moments, her studiedly defiant speech to the doubting 1980 Conservative conference – that suggests these heavy volumes will be leavened with too much fresh or independent thinking. Robin Harris worked with Thatcher, often "closely" in his words, for a quarter of a century from the late 70s, as a speechwriter, ghostwriter, adviser, organiser and diehard supporter. In her memoirs, she calls him "my indispensable sherpa". Charles Moore has been one of Britain's best-known rightwing journalists for equally long. Since Thatcher's death, he has seemed happy to mix his promotional duties as an author with defending her against, as he put it on Question Time, "People who are horrible … promoting the idea that she is [sic] very divisive."

Moore was chosen by Thatcher to be her official biographer in 1997. It was the year her party finally lost power: her reputation, it was reasonable to assume, was going to need some protecting. "The arrangement that Lady Thatcher offered me," writes Moore, "was that I would have full access to herself … and to her papers. She would assist all my requests for interviews with others … As a result of her support … the then Cabinet Secretary, Sir Richard Wilson, gave permission for all existing and former civil servants to speak freely to me about the Thatcher years, and allowed me to inspect government papers, held back from public view under the thirty-year rule." Moore has exploited this unique access with thoroughness and skill; but a sense of the British establishment granting favours to one of its own hangs over this book, and is never quite dispelled.

Harris began his book in 2005, the year of another post-Thatcher Tory general election defeat. Despite the existence of the Moore project, it appears she was keen to collaborate with Harris too. He reprints a letter from her: "I can think of no one better placed than you to tackle the subject … You know, better than anyone else, what I wanted our reforms to achieve." Elsewhere in his preface, Harris pointedly describes Moore's book as "a further, 'authorized' work". As prime minister, one of Thatcher's ambitions was to make Britain more competitive; posthumously, it's clear that included her biographers.

Yet as in the utilities she privatised, competition sometimes doesn't produce much choice for consumers. Both these books begin, as almost every Thatcher biography has for decades, with a reverent depiction of her Grantham childhood, all formative hard graft and smalltown English virtues, which in the retelling – not least by Thatcher as a rising politician – has long become as sepia-tinted as a rustic Hovis advertisement. Moore describes her ambitious shopkeeper father as "tall, with piercing blue eyes and wiry blond hair"; Harris calls him "tall, blond and blue-eyed". As a young girl, writes Harris, Thatcher had "a sweet smile, beautiful hair, flashing blue eyes". Here, as in much of the rightwing writing about her since her death, Thatcher seems to be becoming a sort of Tory Evita.

But then Harris's book wakes up. In Grantham and afterwards, he abruptly remarks, Thatcher "would never be very interested in people's personalities … only in their actions – and specifically those of their actions that directly concerned her." Further tart assertions about her personality and habits quickly follow. When she ate, food would be "hoovered up as quickly as possible". When she worked on official papers as prime minister, she often sat "in her [Downing Street] study in a high-backed chair … Over the years her feet wore a hole in the carpet. She refused to have a new one and had a patch inserted."

In political conversation, "She had no real sense of place … adopting even in private discussion the same aggressive and self-justificatory stance as she would in a hostile television interview." As a thinker, although she carried a collection of excerpts from Winston Churchill's speeches and broadcasts in her handbag, Harris writes, she "did not have much historical sense, merely some rather romantic and fanciful historical notions".

After all the eulogies, it is refreshing to read about an odd, driven, believable person – rather than some abstract national saviour or demon. In his confident generalisations about Thatcher, Harris is like a long-faithful courtier freed by a monarch's death to speak the truth about them. He is not that interested in piling up evidence for his assertions. Like an article in the Spectator, the writing can be lordly rather than logical, and the word "probably" appears more often than in most biographies. Much of the book is closer to memoir or polemic – you need to take it on trust.

The recounting of Thatcher's dark-horse dash through the Conservative party pack and tumultuous premiership is efficient rather than revelatory. There are slow stretches where Harris summarises and justifies her policies, one by one; and equally relentless but more quotable attacks on Thatcher's many Tory enemies and allies-turned-nemeses, such as her chancellors Nigel Lawson ("too clever by half") and Geoffrey Howe ("raddled with bitterness").

Moore is more measured. His dense, intricate volume, the first of an intended two, follows Thatcher only up to the autumn of 1982, less than a third of the way into her premiership. For now at least, this cut-off date robs his version of her story of the always-compelling element of rise and fall – the latter vividly and emotionally depicted by Harris – and instead makes Moore's Thatcher narrative like one of the economic graphs in Thatcherism's boom years: jagged but generally upward.

There are some surprises, though. Thatcher's sister Muriel, barely mentioned by other biographers, is revealed as the recipient of frank letters from the teenage Margaret. Of an Oxford university boyfriend, pre-Denis, also previously undetected by biographers, she writes: "Tony hired a car and we drove out to Abingdon to the country inn 'Crown and Thistle'. I managed to borrow a glorious royal blue velvet cloak … I felt absolutely on top of the world as I walked through the lounge … and everyone looked up." That Thatcher had a bit of a life before parliamentary politics claimed her in the early 50s is a less sensational discovery than some of the publicity around this book has trumpeted; but Moore, with typical care and perceptiveness, produces a clever coda to his account of the Tony relationship. In 1974, long after it was over, Tony, now a stockbroker with a professional interest in the housing market, produced a scheme for council tenants to buy their homes. As the shadow minister responsible for housing, Thatcher invited him to the Commons. "She made only the most glancing acknowledgement of their old acquaintance and got straight down to the policy, towards which she was very receptive."

This is Moore's first book (Harris has written or ghostwritten half a dozen), and its prose is understated and less partisan than his journalism. Occasionally, the long, controlled paragraphs curl almost imperceptibly into dry wit. In the mid-60s, he writes, "At the highest levels of the [Tory] party … suspicions were aroused that the rise of Margaret Thatcher might represent some sort of threat to male peace and tranquility." Nor is Moore a total prisoner of his many sources. Their testimony is weighed, and sometimes contradicted. Even Muriel, who granted a rare interview, is corrected when she claims that Margaret was too busy to go to their father's funeral, with reference to Margaret's "two engagement diaries of the period" and a report in the Grantham Journal.

There is a downside to all this neat dovetailing of material and elegantly murmuring, High Tory style. Thatcherism was in many ways an unsubtle, unstable political project, exhilarating or brutal depending on where you stood; yet only the exhilaration feels fully present in Moore's narrative, for all his conscientious detailing of Thatcherism's 70s and 80s ups and downs. Part of the problem may be the slightly sketchy way he deals with the world beyond. There is not quite enough sense of the social texture of Britain, and how that changed, as Thatcher rose, and how that change helped her. Similarly, events outside Westminster that proved pivotal for her – the 1978-9 winter of discontent that probably won her the 1979 election; the 1981 urban riots that so undermined her early premiership – are recorded too briefly and cursorily. Meanwhile, Moore's politics surface unhelpfully when he caricatures postwar Britain as in "steep decline", the economy under Labour in the 60s as a "car crash", and the IMF that eagerly helped do away with British social democracy in the 70s as "impartial".

As much of the debate since her death has shown, there are still plenty of takers for this doomy, simplistic view of pre-Thatcherite Britain. But present-day historians are becoming steadily less keen on it, and the struggles of our Thatcherised economy since 2007 don't augur too well for the long-term reputation of books that present her rule as having solved all our problems. Moore is more nuanced than that; unlike Harris, he offers a few quiet but stinging criticisms of her policies, for example on council house sales, which led to "the gradual build-up of a housing shortage which, in 1979, had not existed, and the stoking, for the future, of a housing bubble".

The other long-term value of this book is likely to be its sheer quantity of new or rarely deployed material. Alfred Sherman, the fiercest of Thatcher's many thinkers, told Moore before he died: "She was a woman of beliefs, and beliefs are better than ideas." As the Falklands taskforce set off, the then French president François Mitterrand, in theory Thatcher's ideological opposite, mused aloud, according to the diary of one of his advisors, "Do I admire her … or envy her?" Journalists and academics will be combing these pages for quotes and details for years, as they did the previous big Thatcher biographies, John Campbell's two volumes from 2000 and 2003 and Hugo Young's early version from 1989. Compared with Young's compelling mix of admiration and castigation, and Campbell's panoramic, even-handed treatment, Moore's effort lacks originality sometimes, but he has more facts. They do not profoundly change the picture of Thatcher we already have, but facts about mythologised figures are valuable.

Few parts of her life are as hazy as her final years. In the best section of his book, Harris gives an extended, intimate account of the empty, sad quarter of a century that unfurled for her after the abrupt termination of her premiership and Tory leadership in 1990. The House of Lords "she found soporific" and "ponderous". The continuing hold of her ideas over the Conservative and Labour governments that followed hers did not compensate for the loss of office and the cross-party rejection of her governing style as too feverish and shrill. She looked for causes, not always wisely. When the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998 for crimes against humanity, Thatcher campaigned for his release. Harris was one of the campaign's organisers, and reprises here his and Thatcher's rather chilling justifications for Pinochet's "beneficial" rule. Yet Harris also claims – in novelistic, unsparing detail – that when Thatcher visited Pinochet during his British confinement, he had recently suffered "a series of small strokes – as, indeed, had she, though she did not yet know it".

Another scene describes her working around this time in her office in wealthy, sterile Belgravia, in a "high-backed chair" as in Downing Street, "looking at papers with the help of a huge magnifying glass … underlining, marking marginalia, gathering odds and ends together in files, and then forgetting where she had put them". It will be interesting to see what Moore's second volume makes of her decline. It had fewer witnesses than her rise. Like the little-reported thinness of her funeral crowds once you got a few hundred yards away from St Paul's Cathedral, some sides of the Thatcher story are melancholy rather than inspiring, even for rightwingers. Now she's gone, perhaps biographers can be more honest about her limits.

• When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies by Andy Beckett is published by Faber

BiographyMargaret ThatcherAndy Beckett
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