Fellatio, Masochism, Politics and Love Leo Abse Robson Books, 220pp, £17.95 ISBN 1861053517

The Prime Minister should think himself lucky that his encounter with the Women's Institute took place after Leo Abse's essay went to press. A man who can sustain 50 pages on the role of fellatio as a demonstration of the impulse to sexual self-abnegation in the male, would have been in metaphorical orbit as the slow handclap of several hundred mothers, wives and lovers expressed a rejection that Tony cannot truly have felt since the withdrawal of the nipple.

Abse, for many years the MP for Pontypool, is one of the unacknowledged legislators of the past half-century. He was responsible for ending legal sanctions against homosexuality - which had Richard Crossman grumbling about "the Buggers' Bill" upsetting Labour voters. Involved with divorce and in vitro legislation (where he offended Enoch Powell, whom he analyses here), instigator of government support for family planning and engineer of the 1975 Children Act, he has been of more practical use than two Cabinet ministers in three. But he is, to vigorous excess, a practising Freudian; and, amid the slips and ironies to which that faith is prone, he probably relishes the thought of being the father of the Vasectomy Act.

Notoriously, Freudians dislike humour - something to do with toilet training - but Abse crackles with all the devilment of a South Walian making trouble. His book - the sex part and the politics bit - is polemical, sweeping, unfair and wrong, except where it is perceptive and morally unanswerable. I always have trouble with Freudian notions of sex being underneath everything - the dried pea under 20 mattresses of social control - and am inclined to think that sex is very nice and quite useful in its way, but that it should not be gone on about. And nobody goes on like Abse. Monica Lewinsky did the zip, flip and thank-you bit for poor old world-governing Bill Clinton as an act of empowerment, another victory in the war that the "philandering feminist unconsciously wages against man and her biology". By contrast, Clinton was motivated by an impulse to masochistic male surrender.

Yet Abse can talk much good and humane sense, too. He argues powerfully for something that the Daily Mail rants about but does not understand: namely, the family. Too contemptuous of Tony Blair to waste good time on him - beyond pointing out that Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson are all second sons and thus born to envious emulation - he concentrates on the clever member of the trio. The Chancellor is a notoriously hesitant bridegroom. The same Chancellor hectors the undeserving, the not working, the not trying to succeed. This is less Calvinism, says Abse, than horror of dependent relationships, a worship of accumulation and virtue through striving. And when Brown legislates, by way of tax, he punishes the family.

Abse quotes Martin Wolf of the Financial Times: "In contemporary theory and practice, a family is a unit of mother and children. Men are seen as optional extras . . . the government is providing a substantial boost to the resources available to mothers and improving their ability to dispense with both men and full-time motherhood." So the working wife - bringing in money; the mother/carer/bonder of a whole family - remains misunderstood.

Abse is rooted in old-style right-wing Labour attitudes that are far to the left of the present government, and in the warm Welsh community (or family). He uses the language of sex to criticise, as he sees it, the Thatcherian nature of new Labour. For these people, there is such a thing as society - an assembly of cost-effective, competitive utilitarian units. It is a compelling judgement, although a necessarily Adlerian one.

Edward Pearce's most recent book is Lines of Most Resistance (Little, Brown, £18.99)

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