WHAT BOOK?

…are you reading now?

I’VE got two on the go. I haven’t read a novel in years, but a few weeks ago I interviewed the author John O’Farrell for my Iain Dale All Talk podcast and we discussed his new book Family Politics. It intrigued me so I thought I’d give it a go.

It’s all about two Left-wing, wokey parents whose son returns home from university and warns them he needs to tell them something.

They assume he’s going to come out as gay. But it’s far worse than that. He comes out as a Conservative. Imagine. The rest of the book revolves around how they all come to terms with this revelation. Any family rent asunder by Brexit will recognise what they go through.

I’m also reading Charles III by Robert Hardman, which is the best book you will ever read about our new king.

…would you take to a desert island?

IT WOULD need to be a long one, so I am going to cheat and take the three volumes of Chips Channon’s Diaries, edited magnificently by Simon Heffer. They’re each more than 1,000 pages long, so I wouldn’t mind if it took a long time to rescue me.

…first gave you the reading bug?

IN MY childhood it would definitely have been Enid Blyton, and in particular The Magic Faraway Tree and her children’s detective stories. For some reason The Secret Of Spiggy Holes sticks in my mind.

I then graduated on to Watership Down and The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe. Even now I can remember that book sending me on flights of incredible imaginary fancy, in the same way Harry Potter did for later generations.

In my teenage years I became hooked on the horror novels by James Herbert like The Rats, Lair and The Fog. They basically gave me my sex education. Utter filth. Few can ever forget the gym scene in The Fog. I never have!

…left you cold?

ANYTHING vaguely literary leaves me cold. All the books I know I ought to read, I just can’t be doing with. Shakespeare, Austen, the Brontes, Dickens. Nope.

I’ve never completed a single book by any of our greatest writers. I tend to concentrate on reading political biographies.

■ British General Election Campaigns 1830–2019: The 50 General Election Campaigns That Shaped Our Modern Politics by Iain Dale (Biteback £25) is out now.