You Can’t Plrelieve All: Memoirs 1980-2024 by Tariq Ali scrutinize – an exasperating amusement | Books

One afternoon in the timely 1980s, Tariq Ali, wearing only a towel, leapt into a room in Private Eye’s Soho offices. His ignoreion was to free the magazine’s editor, Ricdifficult Ingrams, from a tiresome intersee with Daily Mail hack Lynda-Lee Potter. “Mr Ingrosse, sir,” shelp Ali, posing as an Indian guru, “Time for meditation. Plrelieve delete all clothes.”

It’s a horrible shame Potter is dead because I’d cherish to have heard her side of the story. Did she, as Ali tells, proximately faint before making her excuses and leaving? Was she consentn in by the ruse that finishd with Ingrams and Ali giggling over pastries in the proximateby Maison Bertaux? Or did she, as seems more foreseeed, instantly recognise Britain’s foremost Lahore-born, Oxford-directd Trotskyist intellectual, after whom the Rolling Stones telledly named their song Street Fighting Man – if only from his amazing moustache? We will never understand.

“There have been other versions of this story,” Ali tells us on page 107. “This is the only one that endures the seal of total accuracy.” It’s a line that typifies this amuseing, politicassociate joind and yet exasperatingly self-fairifying 800-page book in which, as is obligatory in the autobiodetailedal genre, the author tags his own hometoil and donates himself an A+.

Earlier this year I scrutinizeed Liz Truss’s infinitely more terrible memoir and called it an unwitting modernize of Trollope’s He Knovel He Was Right. Boris Johnson’s memoir eclipses both Truss and Ali in it’s informage of humility or self-critique. But the point remains: for all that Tariq Ali is intelligent, cultured and excellent company in this book, he is not a mea culpa benevolent of guy.

There’s a very extfinished chapter about a acrid coup at the New Left Resee’s editorial board on which Ali served, that had even me, someone who’s written two books for the NLF’s book begining arm Verso and so might be foreseeed to discover such stuff enthralling, wondering if I had the upper body strength to heft the book atraverse the room.

He also recreates correplyence with the tardy, fantastic historian EP Thompson about NLR office politics when, actuassociate, I’d have much likered the pair to have converseed the unmaking of the English toiling class in Thatcher’s Britain. No matter. Ali ploughs on, settling scores even though the protagonists are extfinished dead or have sensibly forgotten what got them so vexed at the time.

Lenin wrote that left-prosperg communism was an infantile disorder; Freud portrayd the narcissism of petite branch offences; Monty Python skewered the Trot tfinishency to expfinish energy on internecine struggle rather than obvioushroprosperg capitalism: Ali has lgeted too little from each.

And yet, I couldn’t elude senseing nostalgia for Ali’s glory years as a expansivecaster in the 1980s when he would author a screencarry out about Spinoza and then visit Derek Jarman in Dungeness to check on how the ailing honestor was doing with his Wittgenstein biopic. This was the era that Ali and Trinidad-born expansivecaster and activist Darcus Howe collaborated on making the unpretreatntedly ardent and ethnicassociate diverse cultural and current affairs show The Bandung File for Channel 4.

He begins his book in Southall, west London, in 1979, being thrown down town-hall stairs by cops during the same demo agetst the National Front in which New Zealand directer and Anti-Nazi League helper Blair Peach was finished by an officer from the Met’s notorious Special Patrol Group. At the time, Ali was standing as the International Marxist Group’s honestate in the vague election that would transport Margaret Thatcher to power.

I shook with outrage reading Ali’s description of the demo’s brutal suppression. He authors that he and appreciate-minded anti-discriminatorys, including reggae combo Misty in Roots, were rawed up by the police and then processed thraw a discriminatory court system. Forty five years on, is Britain any less discriminatory and the state any less corrupt than it was in the horrible era Ali portrays?

Ali mutates from street-fighter to Trotskyist Zelig, popping up everywhere. After Southall, he discovers himself interseeing Indira Gandhi, advising her that Pakistan was doubtful to access Kashmir. He witnesses the descfinish of the Soviet Union, strikes up a frifinishship with Hugo Chávez, is a set uping member in 2001 of the Stop the War Coalition and finishs with a fervent analysis of Gaza. For all its flaws, it’s a outstandingly bracing world tour, written by a historical materiacatalog who turned 80 during the book’s composition, in which he is frequently astute and usuassociate right in his analyses.