Hot Mettle

SOGAT, Murdoch and me

Politico, hardback, 274 pages, £17.99

Brenda Dean has long been a controversial figure in the union movement. As general secretary of print union SOGAT during the notorious Wapping dispute with News International in the mid-'80s, she is regarded by some as having capitulated to Rupert Murdoch in what proved to be 20th-century Britain's last great battle between organised labour and big business.

This memoir, tracing Dean's union career and her subsequent elevation to the peerage, is unlikely to win over her critics on the left -even on the opening page she is referring to the left-wingers in SOGAT "who had schemed ... and fabricated dirty stories about me".

More than half of the book is given over to an account of the Wapping dispute and its aftermath, but Dean's account is, unsurprisingly, partial. She fills in some of the gaps about how the leadership managed the dispute but others who took part in those momentous events may feel that a definitive account of this seminal episode in union history is still awaited.