The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Can we agree on anything?
The Tory meltdown was just one sign of the all-against-all spirit of our times
This year’s political books were dominated by the downfall of the Conservatives. Nadine Dorries’s The Plot (HarperCollins, £25) – which chronicles the collapse of Boris Johnson’s government – spots so many traitors under so many beds that critics have dubbed it “Lost the Plot”, but it’s a rollicking good read, spiced up with some top-drawer bitchy gossip (think Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as told by Joan Rivers).
Dorries thinks Johnson was the best PM since the Earl of Sliced Bread; however, Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell (Johnson at 10: The Inside Story, Atlantic, £25), paint him as a chaotic narcissist who only did what was best for Boris (“If Britain benefited in the process, well, it was a fortunate occurrence”). Rory Stewart hates him, too, but his highly amusing Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within (Jonathan Cape, £22) acknowledges that the crisis in British government is structural as well as personal: briefs are too wide, civil servants run the show, MPs are out of their depth. Stewart thinks the average politician isn’t qualified to run fisheries or buses – yet, curiously, he was convinced he should have been PM.
The best summary of our era might be my colleague Ben RileySmith’s The Right to Rule: Thirteen Years, Five Prime Ministers and the Implosion of the Tories (John Murray, £25), in which he argues that the Conservatives’ absence of ideology enabled them to reinvent themselves in reaction to the very crises they had caused, from Remain to Leave and now back to austerity. The current debate is whether they should reconcile with traditional Tory voters or, as academic Matthew Goodwin
‘Mossad has been accused of putting a shark in the Red Sea that ate a grandma’
prefers, lean into the realignment triggered by Brexit. His Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics (Penguin, £10.99) depicts an electorate in rebellion against woke elites.
Covenant (Swift, £20) by the Conservative MP Danny Kruger, meanwhile, encourages the Right to step back from rugged individualism and reroot itself in family and community. It’s the best articulation of a resurgent Tory socialism I’ve read, though I also recommend The New Leviathans (Allen Lane, £20) by the political philosopher John Gray (a sort of socialist Tory), who shows us that the 20th century was not the future we expected – its experiment in utopia being merely a diversion. Now, we have returned to a grim, Hobbesian state of nature, both abroad (Ukraine, Israel) and at home, where “rival groups seek to capture the power of the state in a new war of all against all between self-defined collective identities”.
How’s that war going in the US? This was the year that Ron DeSantis tried to beat Donald Trump by joining him. His The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival (HarperCollins, £25) details his populist wars on lockdown and Disney – the latter is somewhat ironic, as DeSantis, in person, sounds not unlike Mickey Mouse. The Right might be antielite, but it certainly ain’t normal, as confirmed in the revelations of life at Fox News that fill Michael Wolff ’s masterful, hilarious The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire (The Bridge Street Press, £25).
Of all America’s celebrity conservatives, I’ve always regarded Trump as the most normal; he’ll probably outlast Brexit, which Peter Foster dissects with a meat cleaver in What Went Wrong With Brexit: And What We Can Do About It (Canongate, £14.99). Foster’s politics might not be mine, but he’s a fine writer and if you want to know what the other side thinks, this is the place to start. And if you wish to know what Europe is becoming without us in its club, you’d do well to read Ben Judah’s This Is Europe: The Way We Live Now (Picador, £22). Critics are uncertain about Judah’s style – so self-consciously breathless, it begins to evoke emphysema – but his collage of oral histories captures a continent that is being redefined by mass migration. There is, for example, Ibrahim, a refugee from Syria who became a successful porn star in Budapest. Now that’s what I call assimilation.
What does Western liberalism’s war of all against all mean for the individual? The sad reality is documented in Graham Linehan’s Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy (Eye, £19.99). The co-creator of Father Ted was cancelled for speaking out against trans ideology, destroying his family and career in the process (the most positive thing that happened to him, he writes, was getting cancer of the testicles). “I’m also the person who worked with Steve Martin and Martin Short for the shortest period of time.” Linehan received an offer to write for their TV show – and, five minutes later, received a follow-up email taking it back. “Someone else with a prior claim had suddenly materialised, I suspect around the same time a Twitter user in the producer’s office told him I was a bigot.”
The personal has become horribly political. Naomi Klein, in Doppelgänger: A Trip into the Mirror World (Allen Lane, £25), recounts the odd experience of being confused for the conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf. Tomiwa Owolade in This Is Not America: Why Black Lives in Britain Matter (Atlantic, £18.99) expresses frustration with the confusion of transatlantic black experiences – America’s being steeped in memories of slavery, ours in voluntary migration. “We should understand race in Britain through a British perspective,” he says, “and we shouldn’t reduce black people to their race.”
But I’m giving my cashless prize for 2023’s book of the year to Jake Wallis Simons’s Israelophobia: The Newest Version of the Oldest Hatred and What to Do About It (Constable, £12.99), which became tragically relevant just weeks after publication.
This is not propaganda: Simons acknowledges that Israel is deeply flawed and deserving of critique. But the strange, ambiguous response to the killings of Israelis on October 7 retrospectively proves his argument that the country is judged by a different standard because it is Jewish. Anti-Semitism is always articulated in the spirit of its age; ours happens to be paranoid and frighteningly thick. “Mossad,” notes Simons, “has been accused of infiltrating a shark into the Red Sea that ate a German grandmother.” The mind boggles; the heart despairs.
Tim Stanley’s latest book is Whatever Happened to Tradition? (Bloomsbury, £10.99)