You sit around the shadow cabinet table for years working with people that you get on perfectly well with on a professional level, but the whole thing is riven with personal jealousies I was well aware that my rising so rapidly was.. very sickening to my colleagues But there was nothing I could do about it. Finally, came last year's Goodbye To All That, in which Gould sweetly - plink, plonk, plink - crucified a number of his former colleagues while exposing some of the party's darkest internal divisions. The bare knuckles came out in printed response: Roy Hattersley led the attack; Donald Dewar got in a few blows; Gerald Kaufman suggested that an alternative title for the book could have been Diary Of An Almost Somebody."Yes, well, in many ways it confirmed the rightness of my decision to leave," Gould says, perhaps a touch too quickly, when asked about the reviews "Politics is a hard and unpleasant business. Subsequently, in what was generally seen to be a fit of pique tinged with the humiliation of publicly thwarted ambition (although Gould credits his "Eurosceptic and devaluationist ideas"), he left the shadow cabinet Two years later, he left politics at just the wrong time. He could not have foreseen it, but John Smith's sudden death might have offered Gould the best chance he could ever have had of realising his political dream. He forsook Labour's conceit of seamless unity (and displayed spectacularly bad political judgement) by challenging John Smith for the party leadership in 1992 at the same time as standing for the deputy leadership. Shadow transport secretary Clare Short says paying more taxes is fine by her The Blair people scream Short gets carpeted Apologies are tendered.

And the message again goes out: beware of passion, drive or the development of an individual opinion; it could be interpreted as obsession or, worse, leftism. In such a context, the historical airbrushing of Gould was, if not exactly certain, pretty well assured. Bryan was an outsider in the Labour Party, which is no respecter of academic qualifications or indeed of intelligence itself. That's why he became an exile on the back bench when he should have been playing a central part in things.""I believe," says Gould glumly, "that my broad range of opinions and approaches will eventually come back into fashion.

So, in some ways, coming back to New Zealand was a bad political move." He smiles thinly. "People will come to say that they can see the sense in what I did But it will be too late for me. I'm gone."But Gould's exit - first from the scene, then from the country - did take place in another context: the moving of the Labour Party to the Right, and the shipment of dissenters into what Paul Routledge has described in this newspaper as the party's new gulag Current examples abound. "What one has to understand about the British Labour Party is that when one is right, one is wrong. It's better to be wrong in the company of the majority rather than right and on your own. "Mandelson hates Bryan," sniffed Austin Mitchell, the only Labour MP I approached who would publicly acknowledge a connection with Gould. The picture hangs behind Gould's desk, an appropriate place, or so it seems, for a man whose courtly face is now turned away from politics.

But where precisely is Gould's heart?For some reason, we find ourselves talking about Enoch Powell, a name with which, it is said, he often conjures. "Enoch Powell is someone I had a very curious relationship with, and not one that I'd readily own up to," he tells me. "He believed what he wanted to believe, and he had the capacity to intellectualise it But his politics were from the gut In a way, despite appearances, I'm a bit like that too. A lot of what Powell said was unattractive - on the race issue, of course, he was beyond the pale - but on a lot of other issues he was worth listening to." On what issues? Well, replies Gould eventually, "with almost complete accuracy, Enoch Powell once said that all political careers end in failure."Failure. In modern political ideology, you can't get any blacker than that.