Whatever it takes not to go wobbly

Stiff gins, big huggers and ‘Borderdom’ – Asa Bennett on the most curious cogs in the Westminster machine

sooner,” she laments.

Thomas Myler’s comprehensive biography Joe Louis: The Rise and Fall of the Brown Bomber (Pitch, £19.99) also touches on the sport’s soul-destroying aspects. When Louis, undisputed heavyweight champion of the world for 11 years and nine months, started out in the

Thirties, one “commandment” from his manager was that “he was never to have his photograph taken with a white woman”.

Boxers get pounded in the ring, rugby players get pummelled on the field. Wales and Lions star Sam Warburton needed surgery to have plates fixed in his jaw and under an eye socket, and pins put into both shoulders. In Open Side (HarperCollins, £20), he recounts the mental and physical toll. He opens up about how it feels to know that your career is over at 29, and about the World Cup semifinal red card that left him sobbing “hot, angry tears” of remorse.

Sport can be a lot to endure.

It has been a great year for political biography. Charles Moore brought to an end his magisterial three-part life of Margaret Thatcher with Herself Alone (Allen Lane, £35), which follows the Iron Lady from her final election victory in 1987 to her turbulent political fall, charting the controversy that surrounded her in retirement, and even in death. Moore’s commanding scholarship sets the record straight on all manner of things, from Mrs Thatcher’s behind-the-scenes efforts to end apartheid, culminating in a secret meeting with Nelson Mandela in 1990; to when exactly she told George Bush Snr not to “go wobbly” over Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait; and what she might have thought about Brexit. The answer, Moore reveals, is that, after leaving office, she said the UK would be “better off outside” the EU – confiding this in private because it was too much of a bombshell to drop in public.

To judge by his furious memoir, For the Record (William Collins, £25), David Cameron is still shell-shocked by his defeat in the 2016 referendum. This account draws on the recordings he made in office, and is packed with colour, whether about Jean-Claude Juncker (“a big hugger and kisser”) or his own wife, Samantha, who steeled herself on the morning he stepped down by knocking back a “stiff gin”. The book is, if anything, too comprehensive – no decision Cameron took in government seems too small for him to review. Nonetheless, his voice is clear, searingly so on his personal life, as he recounts the heartbreaking struggle of his disabled son, Ivan.

Jacob Rees-Mogg has embraced his reputation as an old fogey in The Victorians: Twelve Titans Who Forged Britain (WH Allen, £20), a much-maligned book that lacks the Rees-Moggian spark. He can take lessons from 76-year-old Today legend John Humphrys, whose enjoyably bracing memoir,

A Day Like Today (William Collins, £20), settles plenty of scores.

Theresa May will want to avoid Anthony Seldon’s quietly damning May at 10 (Biteback, £25), which lays out the travails of her premiership. Jeremy Corbyn will take no more pleasure from Tom Bower’s no-holds-barred biography, Dangerous Hero (William Collins, £9.99). Bower cannot decide whether Corbyn is a bumbling old fool or a ruthless political operator, and so goes for both in this scattershot book.

Light relief can be found in Marie Le Conte’s fantastically fruity Haven’t You Heard? Gossip, Power, and How Politics Really Works (535, £16.99) and its academic counterpart, Sex, Lies and Politics: The Secret Influences that Drive Our Political Choices (Biteback, £9.99), edited by Philip Cowley and Robert Ford. The latter is stuffed with eye-opening gems, while the former lifts the lid on the boozeaddled world of Westminster.

Neither will cure the kind of political malaise defined by the satirical Twitter account @BorderIrish, in I Am the Border, So I Am (HarperCollins, £9.99), as “Borderdom”: “state of ennui brought on by hearing people talk about the border and Brexit”. “Without ado, let’s do it pell-mell,” Johnson is imagined saying in Boris Starling’s William Shakespeare’s Brexit (535, £9.99). “If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell!” One can only hope all’s well that ends well.

Asa Bennett’s Romanifesto: Modern Lessons from Classical Politics (£11.99) is published by Biteback

‘BETTER OFF OUTSIDE’ Margaret Thatcher in 1987