IT IS increasingly a convention, in Anglo-American politics, for those seeking high political office to put out a book.

Typically this will involve a treatise on the importance of fighting for things that are good and opposing things that are bad, a multitude of references to Martin Luther King, and recollections of things that the candidate’s mother used to say, (by which I mean homely catchphrases that are suspiciously well suited to the art of political autobiography, as opposed to stuff like: “Beto, stop pissing on the toilet seat”).

It is therefore unsurprising that, on the eve of the general election campaign, Jess Phillips has released a new work. I decided to take some time off from fixating on this fairly angsty election campaign to peruse Truth to Power: 7 Ways to Call Time on BS.

To engage with Jess Phillips is to be confronted by paradox. On the one hand, it is drummed into you that she is a politician who “speaks her mind.” On the other hand, it can be remarkably difficult to locate any joined-up explanation of what she actually stands for.

Speaking Truth To Power is consistent with this paradox. In this book, Tom Watson and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) star alongside each other as inspiring politicians “who’ve stood up” — and to “the powerful” — an equally amorphous group.

At the same time, the author rarely misses an opportunity to remind us that she is a politician who stands up and says what’s what.

At times, the stylistic effort to project such a persona is distractingly visible. Phillips recounts making a very emotional speech “to Theresa May’s face,” by which she means, she addressed the Commons at a moment when the Prime Minister was present.

You wonder whether any other politicians have ever felt moved to deploy such an aggressive tactic.

Meanwhile, Phillips’s habit of quoting her own witty Twitter replies makes her attempt to talk about herself via the medium of other people somewhat less than subtle.

It should of course be said that there is some good stuff in this book. The story of Sara Rowbotham, the social worker who blew the whistle over the inaction around child-abuse in north-west England, is moving, well-written, and contains some important lessons.

Phillips also offers some good practical tips on pushing an issue forward and makes an encouraging case that those who do make change are not in possession of any special powers that the rest of us can never hope to muster.

Yet unfortunately, the myth that history is made by great men is replaced by the myth that history is made an accumulation of individual acts of moral courage. The figures in her book are often disaggregated from the political movements that they were part of.

James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam are described as “two ex-Uber drivers” who brought a case to court in pursuit of proper employment rights. Literally no mention is made of the role of trade unions in backing the case.

Rosa Parks, meanwhile, is described as “a department store worker who got on a bus and ended up being an icon for the civil rights movement” — when in truth she’d been a leading activist in the local National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People since 1943, and was, from the beginning, involved in a co-ordinated plan to bring down segregation.

Unsurprisingly the author does not hide her contempt for the radical left. “I would love to advocate overhauling all our slow global systems to make wholesale change,” she tells us. “However, this is entirely unrealistic and is usually only shouted about by people who do very little to change stuff and just like to whinge.”

This is not a novel line of attack. Anyone who’s found themselves within earshot of a students’ union during the Blair-Brown years would have heard some wannabe politician earnestly explaining that they were selflessly regurgitating the neoliberal politics of the party leadership because they cared about “real people,” in contrast to pampered revolutionaries who only cared about their dogma.

If you come across these people today, they will tell you that they have always backed the militant left until Corbyn ruined it by not being a Remainiac, or standing next to someone who was bad.

Yet the real trouble with this argument is not simply that it’s old, and often dishonestly self-interested, but that it is nonsense.

If Jess Phillips had bothered to look at who was organising alongside Rosa Parks to desegregate the South, or alongside the “two ex-Uber drivers” to win proper employment rights, she would have found a great many members of the US Communist Party and a great many members of the British extra-parliamentary left — none of whom are particularly reticent about advocating the wholesale overthrow of all existing social conditions.

The art of “speaking truth to power” cannot be reduced to an adult version of standing up to the school bully.

Ultimately it does matter where you stand on free markets, the power of share-ownership, and on other institutions that govern our daily lives. It does, in other words, really truly matter whether you are AOC or whether you are Tom Watson.