READING LIST

Michael Barber on our parliamentarians’ holiday books

‘Men of power have no time to read; yet the men who do not read are unfit for power.’ So wrote Michael Foot, who grew up in a house that contained 70,000 books, wrote several himself, and is arguably the most literate British politician ever to have held high office.

I’m sure the Publishers Association would agree with Foot’s assertion (despite its gender bias), which may be why, to mark their quasquicentennial, they canvassed MPS, peers and peeresses for their recommended read for the Summer recess. Sadly, it would appear that those set in authority over us either don’t have much time to read, or are reluctant to show their hand, because out of a total of approximately 1,450 parliamentarians, only 65 replied, three of them anonymously.

The Prime Minister, lest we forget, used to be a journalist. Indeed he’s been reported as saying that he still answers to his old employer, the

Torygraph. Hence, presumably, his choice of Scoop, which Evelyn Waugh based on his coverage of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia for the

Daily Mail. But I wonder if Boris is aware of how contemptuous Waugh was of his colleagues. ‘Only a shit could be good on this particular job,’ he told Lady Diana Cooper, who appears as Mrs Stitch.

The Chancellor, a keen football fan, will be studying Twelve Yards, a book about the art and psychology of penalties by Ben Lyttelton, who also wrote Edge: What Business Can Learn from Football, which I assume is already on Mr Sunak’s shelves. His predecessor, Sajid Javid, is said to read Ayn Rand’s novels aloud to his wife, who must love him very much. To take his mind off Covid, the Health Secretary is proposing to grapple with Sino-american rivalry in the Pacific, the subject of Destined

for War by Graham Allison, a distinguished Harvard don who believes that Armageddon can be avoided if Washington and Beijing study The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. Should Mr Javid bump into his colleague, Tobias Ellwood, who chairs the Select Committee on Defence, he can exchange notes with him, because Mr Ellwood’s holiday read is 2034, a cautionary tale by a retired American admiral about war at sea in the near future.

One of the few men to choose a book by a woman is Tory MP Julian Knight, who describes The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper as a ‘beautiful, faultless examination of the role of women in Ancient Rome with striking parallels for today’. Since the heroine is a Pompeian whore I wonder what those parallels are. I doubt you’ll find them in Fantastically Great Women Who Worked Wonders, an inspiring book the Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will be sharing with her daughter. The author of this, Kate Pankhurst, is kin to the famous suffragette Sylvia, whose biography by Rachel Holmes is what the chair of Penguin books, Baroness (Gail) Rebuck, will be reading. I wonder if Holmes alludes to the link between the purple feather Mrs Pankhurst wore in her hat when storming Parliament and the foundation of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds? It’s explained in Mrs Pankhurst’s Purple Feather by Tessa Boase, the choice of Dame Meg Hillier. Caroline Nokes, who chairs the Select Committee on Women and Equalities, says her choice,

More Than a Woman by Caitlin Moran, would ‘give every man an insight’ – including, presumably, the three chaps who serve on the committee she chairs. She might also recommend they read The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart (see reviews page 22), which explains why women are still taken less seriously than men – and what, if anything, can be done about it. No one has chosen this, though one anonymous contributor selects Girl, Woman,

Other by Bernadine Evaristo, whom Ms Sieghart quotes at length in support of her thesis. In fairness, fiction by women is well represented here, with novels by Tracy Chevalier, Maggie O’farrell, Delia Owens, Margaret Atwood and JK Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith – the last of which, says Sieghart, proves her point!

Books that run to a thousand pages had better be vaut le détour. This is certainly the case with Volume 1 of Chips Channon’s Diaries, which the Lord Chancellor, Robert Buckland, plans to read. Chips, the unabashed American arriviste who styled himself ‘the Lord of Hosts’, believed that discretion was a paltry virtue, like thrift. Preferring men to women, and royalty to both, his diaries are unofficial history at its most addictive.

A fervent appeaser, Chips hailed Munich as ‘a respectable gentleman’s peace’. But after the fall of France Churchill knew that to defeat Nazi Germany we would have to resort to dirty tricks, the job of SOE, his ‘Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’. Giles Milton’s history of this subversive unit is the choice of the Secretary of State for Scotland, Alister Jack. Nicola Sturgeon, take note.

A week is a long time in politics. But in public life the rules of the game don’t alter much, as witness this observation from Trollope’s The

Way We Live Now, recommended by William Wagg: ‘there was no knowing what honours might not be achieved in the present days by money scattered with a liberal hand.’ Sound familiar?

One of the few men to choose a book by a woman is Tory MP Julian Knight