120: Summer Books Special

Falls a time to plan ahead and ensure your brand shows up in ways that matter.

4Imprint's promotional products work as hard as you do and make a lasting impression.

From quality apparel, including exclusive brands, to drinkwear, tech, and totes, they've got thousands of options to fit your brand and budget.

Plus, you get free samples, expert help, and their 360-degree guarantee.

So you'll be 4imprint certain everything shows up just right, right on time.

Explore more at 4imprint.com.

4Imprint for certain.

What if Juliet got a second chance at life after Romeo?

And Juliet, the new hit Broadway musical and the most fun you'll have in a theater.

I got the I am the time.

Created by the Emmy-winning writer from Schitt's Creek and pop music's number one hit maker.

And Juliet is exactly what we need right now.

Playing October 7th through 12th at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts.

Tickets now on sale at BroadwaySanjose.com.

Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94.

My name is Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm here in the Private Eye office with Helen Lewis, Adam McQueen, and DJ Taylor.

We are here for our summer culture special, specifically books.

Don't expect any opera or any film or anything else.

The book special, you might be listening to this on a beach.

You might have brought with you, oh, I don't know, a Jack Reacher, a James Patterson, or maybe the diaries of Chips Channon.

Let's hope, because this is page 94.

We're going to be talking about political books.

DJ writes a lot of the reviews, although obviously we can't confirm which ones he does or doesn't write.

But DJ, you read a lot of political books, as well as sort of one-direction memoirs and things in your line of work.

Well, I do.

And it's quite interesting because whenever I propose some kind of political tome for the eye, Ian Hislob always says, God, you're the only person I know who's in the least interested in this terrible, substandard, disappearing, disparaging genre.

And I think there is a way in which

the whole sort of atmosphere in which political memoirs or books about politics get written and received has changed over the last few decades.

I mean, there used to be big commercial propositions.

Ministerial memoirs would be serialized for huge sums of money in Sunday newspapers.

And

the kind of touchstone of this, the thing I always remember, because I lived and worked in London then, this is 30 years ago, and my wife was then working at HarperCollins, who paid a fortune for the two volumes of Mrs.

Thatcher's memoirs.

And the first one, which was the Downing Street Years, came out on a particular Thursday.

And I can remember standing at Nottinghill Tube Station and seeing the flash of the powder blue cover all the way down the platform from various people who had bought it on the day it came out.

It was huge, wasn't it?

It was a big event that coming out.

And I can think of other sort of similar books.

And in fact, any, you know, know, certainly in the 90s, any Tory politician who was anyone could expect a deal for his book.

You know, I mean, Norman Fowler wrote a book called Ministers Decide, which I don't think exactly set the Welkin ringing, but you know, it was a thing.

And then it kind of...

Because in my imagination, it was the David Blunkett memoir that was the last of those incredibly big beast advances.

I think one of the problems was that, of course,

the really back in the day, 40, 50 years ago, the really fruity ones, the ones that were worth reading, were always about Labour politicians.

I remember even the boring ones.

I mean, I remember reading James Callaghan's memoirs, Time and Chance, you know,

and they were.

Yes, but it's funny because of what he leaves out and the euphemism.

So you will get, you know, when you read what he writes about Barbara Castle, a great soul, a fine socialist, it was always a pleasure.

And when you think of how he completely stitched her up as soon as he became Prime Minister, it's all very funny.

So it's one of those rather delphic books, which is great.

It's funny for its omissions, you know, for what it doesn't say.

But then you came, of course, Labour was then out of office.

No one was really interested in the Labour Party for years.

The Tories are always much more boring.

They don't tend to make as good political memoirs or exposés as they used to.

And then there came a time in the early 2000s when they were so boring that no books were written.

I remember the story, in fact, I remember the eye featuring this story over 20 years ago when somebody proposed to write a biography of William Hague and there were no takers.

No publisher would have prepared to put on the money.

So I don't think it actually happened.

And so, but I think it's just generally, we are less interested.

We know more about politicians on a kind of day-to-day business simply because of the onrush of social media and knowing more about people's private lives generally.

In the old days, you didn't really know very much about them.

You knew they were the formal careers.

And if you wanted to know what had actually happened in Parliament and how MPs had cambaled and got together, you quite often had to wait for the memoir to find out about it rather than seeing it in your newspaper the next morning.

It wasn't in WhatsApp, basically.

No, no, there wasn't a WhatsApp group.

And so it was all sort of kind of fascinating.

And so when

the survivors of the Labour Party, the Labour Party shenanigans of the early eighties actually began to write about what had happened at conferences and how unions had come together and the block vote had done something and how one man, one vote had been chucked out because one trade union leader was down the pub.

You tended not to find out until the memoirs were written.

And I think there's been a sea change.

I don't know, Helen, what do what do what do you think?

I into labour beef and don't quote the bit of it that you know that I that upsets me, Adam

I devoured her.

No!

I needed her.

Just those words.

It's like your George Galloway cat impersonation, which makes me feel very tense.

But yeah, I know what you mean.

What's happened, I suppose, into that gap has now come the biteback model, which is that biteback as a small publishing house owned by Lord Ashcroft, will just pound out a biography of absolutely everybody.

So there's one, actually, the title of Barbara Castle's Red Queen, a biography of hers, has been repurposed for Angela Raina, that's the new Angela Rainer one from Bike Back.

There's now a Kemi Badnock one coming out because the assumption is that she might win the Tory leadership race.

But they are done in this very particular way.

I remember Media Hassan, my colleague, wrote one of them about Ed Miliband, and I offered to give him the poor quote: If you only read one biography of Ed Miliband this year, make it this one, which he declined, sadly.

But the model was very upfront about the fact that you tried to find a couple of good news stories in it about it that no one had ever done before, and you would then get a decent amount of money from either the Sunday Times or the Mail on Sunday for an extract.

So they were written in a very different way rather than being a kind of work of art.

They were written with a kind of specific intention to make money from that extract.

I think you're right to identify the David Blunkett book as being one of the turning points on that because there were two problems with that really.

One of which was that it came off the back of all of the shagging stories when he was revealed to be the government's most unlikely Mr.

Loverman in sort of 2004, 2005.

Had to resign from the cabinet and was given to it.

I think I think I'm right in saying it was Harper Collins.

It's usually Harper Collins with all of the things.

It usually was Harper Collins.

And it was part of a deal that he did with his great friend

Rebecca Brooks, which also earned him the most boring column in the sun for a few years after that as well, which sort of got further and further back in the book every week because it was so tedious.

But as part of that deal, he retained, he had a very good agent who retained the serialization rights, which had become, even by that point, I think, the way that you made money on books.

So it was fairly disastrous for the publishers, I think, in that case.

It's interesting you should make that point about the blunkett memoirs, because quite serendipitously the other night I came across a column I wrote for the Independent on Sunday in 2010, so that's 14 years ago, and the column was complaining about Peter Mandelson's memoirs, which were

full of that kind of thing, and naming names and

sort of dissing people he didn't like.

And I complained in the column that this was an example of what I call the celebritification of the political memoir, whereas people previously people had said what they thought had happened discreetly discreetly and/discreetly if it was a Labour politician.

And now you had this kind of conscious clamouring for the limelight that hadn't previously, I think, been a feature of the political memoir.

A few years before that, the first lot of Alastair Campbell diaries came out, which were Bill's extracts from, because he specifically left out all of the

Blair Brown Wars stuff.

So even then...

Blair Brown was still in power, and Alastair Campbell being a Labour man through and through was not going to do anything to compromise.

You're right, even then, stuff was being elated, I think.

And if you wanted, too, and also, too, if you were writing, you know, if you were a biographer of one of these people,

again, your tone tended to be very feline and deft.

I always remember reading with great,

I think in fact was so funny, I think I ended up parodying it rather than reviewing it, which was Philip Ziegler's book about Edward Heath.

And it was clear that Ziegler, who I think had known Heath when he was a Foreign Office clerk in the 1950s, had never really got over the experience.

experience.

And I've never read a biography that damned anybody with quite such faint praise as did that.

But it was all very, very

done in a very feline way.

And

there were those who might criticise Mr Heath for his

aloofness and his glacial qualities.

But talking to Mrs.

Enid Smith, who used to serve him tea in the House of Commons, he said, she said he was quite a nice man, I believe.

And so

the paragraph would falter to a close with this one, you know, and it was it was beautifully done, but you would have had to have known your politics and known

you know, known how irony works to have appreciated exactly what Ziegler was doing.

But that's old school.

I mean, the whole atmosphere in which

subject publisher and writer began about it is,

although it was published in the 2000s, it's last century, I think.

No, but this is what I was curious about, is which is more revealing and in which ways.

I mean, if it's someone telling their own story versus an authorised or unauthorised biography, I think it's a good thing.

I think different things.

You've led me, I think, to the book I was going to choose as one of my favourite political biographies because at the time it was genuinely innovative and the perspective was genuinely innovative.

I mean there had been,

there had previously, back in the 60s and beyond, there had been books, biographies of dead politicians written by their relics.

The one I was going to choose because it really was an eye-opener for the time.

It was published in the early 1980s and that's Susan Crossland's biography of her husband Tony Crossland, Labour Foreign Secretary, who died in office in 19.

I was a schoolboy at the time.

I remember the great shock.

He had only been her secretary of state for about a year and a half, dropped down dead one weekend at his country place

at the age of 59.

And she wrote this very intimate memoir, which didn't pull any punches about how awful he could be, about what a womaniser he could be, about how he rubbed people's backs up, about how he could have been labor leader had he not been so abrasive and annoyed everybody and been so arrogant.

And it really was an absolutely

sort of eyewitness account because she was there of his dying, which is not something you would ever get in any, um, you know, any standard biography.

And so it was a real for 1983 or whatever it was written, it was a real innovation and stands and stands up even today because you learn you learn about the workings of politics in a way that you don't elsewhere.

Because Crosson will come home from cabinet and say, Bloody Tony Benn.

I mean, I taught him at Oxford, he was a complete cretin then, although no, I'm exaggerating.

But, you know, I mean, Crosson was the man whom when Tony Benn, who had been his politics pupil, because Crosson was briefly an Oxford Don, and on one occasion in the 1960s, Bain announced with great ceremony, you know, one of his media appearances that he was he was determined, he had determined to slough off the reputation of being an intellectual.

To which Crossland said, Well, to slough off a reputation, it's first necessary to have one.

So that was the kind of thing of which he was capable.

Those 70s memoirs aren't like that was that is a particularly rich period, isn't it, of political biographies and memoirs.

I mean, I decided not for once to favour you with my thoughts on Barbara Castle, but Harold Wilson did once complain that basically he would sit around the cabinet table and they were all taking taking notes because Tony Benn was writing diaries, there's Crossland diaries.

Barbara Castle's had big chunky volumes of diaries.

So I don't know why was it annoying.

Why was it Adam?

He had a deal from Biden-Felton Nicholson before he'd even left Downing Street the first time.

He was knocking out a book for them.

Yes, okay.

So if we're picking, I mean, I should have said the format at the start.

We're going to pick each of us one Desert Island political memoir.

And then when we're

cast away, presumably the four of us together, we're going to have four books which we can pass around between us.

So have you settled on that picture?

I'm sorry to jump the gun, but yeah,

I would settle on the Crossland because it is so entertaining.

And if you want the real lowdown on those two periods of when Labour was in office, late 60s, late 70s, that really is a kind of how-to guide from someone who observed it all at very, very close hand without being a politician herself.

That's a good one.

And also being American, too.

So, yeah, she was American, Susan Crossen.

So, you get a very interesting kind of, my God, what is this?

occasionally.

Very nice.

And Tony will come and explain something, and she'll say, you mean you do that over here?

And so that, too, is rather.

And you've got both the outside of you and very much the inside of you as well.

Yeah, no, very tonight.

Belle Brighton, eh?

Good.

Anyway, Helen, how about yours?

I have picked The Sun King by Nancy Mitford, which is her biography of Louis XIV and the building of Versailles.

And it does a couple of things that are really interesting.

One, it talks about the stultifying levels of etiquette and the court precedence that overwhelmed the French aristocracy due to the idea that that Louis XIV could have lived in the Louvre and could have lived in Paris.

Instead, he decided to live out in the countryside.

And there's this phrase she uses actually in her biography of Madame de Pompadour about cooping up all of the French aristocrats in a perpetual house party at Versailles.

And you can really see in that because he was a great totalising leader, you know, he was centralised all power to himself.

And he gathered everyone who might have possibly been a rival power base around himself.

But the French became, the aristocracy became so divorced from what was actually happening that at that point, when you then go to the next king Louis XV he was a little bit less good and then Louis XVII he was terrible at managing that state bureaucratic machine you can see that actually in some ways the building of Versailles is the kind of first domino that falls that ends with the French Revolution and because you know this is the woman who wrote about you and non-you you know she was very attuned to ideas about class she's unbelievably fascinating on the madness so There's a huge deal about what kind of seat you were allowed to sit on in the king's presence.

So if you were low-ranking noble, you might get a little like Ottoman, or you might get a chair next.

If you've got a chair with a back, then you were like really one of the big boys.

Ditto, if you were a prince of the blood royal, you could put your kneeling stool straight on in chapel.

Everyone else would have it crooked, and they would spend all their time in chapel, like nudging it towards until someone would look at them and go, Come on, you know,

only the Prince of Condé is allowed to do that.

It's absolutely fascinating, and it's incredibly heavy details, but it also gives you a portrait of an absolute monarch.

And why that can sometimes be a brilliant thing if your absolute monarch is good at running the country, but also it can be a completely fatal thing.

And that is the joy of being an absolute ruler.

You are in charge of absolutely everything until you are beheaded.

And of course, she brought her own Mitford-esque timbre to, do you know what?

Raymond Mortimer, the Bloomsbury critic, once asked Nancy Mitford what she really thought of Louis XIV, and her reply was, absolute heaven, darling.

Can I say the chair thing doesn't stop either.

Famous diplomatic incident in the early 80s when François Mitterrand comes over to Downing Street and gets gets very, very cross about the idea that Mrs.

Thatcher is going to get a chair with arms on and he is going to get one without arms.

And this is literally, there are memos going back and forth between the Elysee Palace and Downing Street for weeks over this.

I'm really not surprised because every time they have a state banquet, you know, people will slave over the seating arrangements, that kind of stuff.

In politics now, there is such an exquisite sense of status that I think if you don't see it from the inside, it's very hard to understand why people do things that are otherwise illogical.

But everybody in politics has got this exquisitely calibrated sense of who's up and who's down.

And they are constantly working within that environment.

It bleeds into absolutely every decision that everybody makes, is this constant antennae alertness.

But we're like that in this office, to be fair.

So true.

But we've all got arms on our chairs, thank God.

I think there's only one chair with arms at the cabinet table.

There is.

That was the problem.

The Prime Minister has a chair with arms.

I see.

The meeting was in the cabinet room.

It was in the cabinet table.

And this was all explained to President Mitterrand, but he was having none of it.

He said, no, if she has arms, then I must have arms as well.

And the way they got round it was to put two armchairs

next to the fireplace instead, and not sit to the cabinet table at all.

See the art of compromise.

Do you want to hear a slightly, slightly relevant Louis XIV anecdote, which does actually have echoes in politics from the last month?

Yes, of course.

Of course, I want to hear that.

Tell us.

Louis XIV was a

youngish to middle-aged man, and he developed a very, very painful fistula in his bottom.

There was a gap where there shouldn't have been a gap, it was very painful, requires surgery.

The surgery was obviously very rudimentary at the time, but

the court appointed appointed a surgeon who practiced, you know, researched, developed his own tools to carry out this procedure.

It really was sort of groundbreaking at the time.

Eventually carried out the procedure.

The king lived.

And, you know, medicine had taken a bit of a step forwards.

Anyway, because of the way the court was at the time,

some members of it started claiming that they too had this terrible condition.

And others, and this is where we come to the parallels with today, started wearing bandages on their bottoms as if they had had the same fistula as Louis XIV.

And where does that bring us to?

It brings us to people wearing bandages on their ears as a tribute to Donald Trump after he was shot.

I think it brings you back to the intro to this podcast where we said, we're going to be talking about culture this week.

Somehow we've got onto the King of France's ass.

I mean,

it just shows everything echoes throughout eternity.

And that is one of the nice things about reading, like, particularly 18th-century memoirs and historical documents, is that people are very open about bodily functions, and particularly when it comes to the king, right?

Whatever was happening with the king's body was everybody's business.

So, you do get these absolutely there's a really long discussion in one of the chronicles about what might be the problem with Henry II's

penis, which goes on for some, some, you know, it's a subject of much debate at court why he can't have any children.

Same thing with Louis XVI.

Like, there's just a kind of openness that we would now, you know, is more now.

Like, I think we took a kind of detour during the Victorian age where people tried to delicately cover some of that stuff up.

I think we're back to Tony and Cherie now, aren't we?

Fall is here, which means it's time to plan ahead and make sure your brand is showing up in ways that have an impact.

That's where 4Imprint comes in.

4Imprint have promotional products that work as hard as you do.

durable, useful, and designed to make a lasting impression.

Think quality apparel your team will wear again and again, including popular and exclusive brands.

Drinkwear that's enjoyed again and again.

Bags, notebooks, tools, and tech items that don't just look good, but actually get used.

With thousands of customizable options, 4Imprint makes it easy to find what fits your brand and your budget.

You'll get expert help, free samples, and their 360-degree guarantee means you can be 4Imprint certain your order shows up just right, right on time.

Whether you're gearing up for fall events or simply planning ahead for the season, 4Imprint helps your brand show up, stay useful, and make connections that last.

Explore the possibilities at 4imprint.com.

For imprint for certain.

You're juggling a lot.

Full-time job, side hustle, maybe a family, and now you're thinking about grad school?

That's not crazy.

That's ambitious.

At American Public University, we respect the hustle and we're built for it.

Our flexible online master's programs are made for real life because big dreams deserve a real path.

At APU, the bigger your ambition, the better we fit.

Learn more about our 40-plus career relevant master's degrees and certificates at apu.apus.edu.

Welcome back, Adam.

We come to you.

I mean, it's going to be Tony Blair's a journey, isn't it?

It's not going to be Tony Blair's a journey.

If I'm stuck on a desert island, I don't want that image in my head.

No, I've chosen two, it's quite appropriate for desert island, actually, because they're about 600 pages each.

I was looking to build a raft out of them.

That'd be brilliant.

Now, honourable mention has to go to Michael Block's biography of Jeremy Thorpe, which just has, for as much as anything else, the backstory behind it.

Because Michael Block approached Jeremy Thorpe.

Now, we all know one thing about Jeremy Thorpe, which is that he tried to have his boyfriend shot and shot his dog instead.

Never talked about this, sort of lived in, he had Parkinson's disease for a very long time, sort of retired from public life, and was a bit of a mystery for all this time.

Michael Block approached him and persuaded him to cooperate with this biography and persuade various of his friends to speak as well.

But it was done on his urgent insistence, was the way Michael Block put it, that it should not appear in his lifetime.

Oh, okay.

Jeremy Thorpe, who everyone thought was a death door, then went on to live for another quarter of a century.

So this manuscript, which is red hot, I mean, it's not just about Norman Scott, it's about an awful lot of other boyfriends as well, and the FBI intercepting letters from him to a boyfriend in San Francisco, and affairs with guardsmen and policemen, and all.

I mean, it's a cracking, cracking tale to it.

I have to say, told slightly better and more concisely in John Preston's A Very English Scandal, which was one that was adapted by Russell T.

Davis into that TV drama.

But it is still a hell of a read, that one.

But my biggie, my top one I'm going to nominate is actually Chris Mullin.

He's done about four now, but the first volume of those was A View from the Foothills, which gives, as we were talking about before, DJ, that sort of insider-outsider view.

And for younger listeners.

So, Chris Mullin was a Labour MP to the left of the party.

I can't very much of that.

And he was brought in as a junior minister.

And this is one of the most extraordinary things about him.

It makes you realize how much politics has changed in the last 20 years.

He was a minister in that enormous Department of Transport and the Regions and Local Government and pretty much everything else that pressed for him.

But along with Michael Meacher, who was another of those figures who in today's Labour Party, you just cannot imagine either of them being brought into the tent at all but the really really interesting thing about this is that he knows Chris Mullen knows exactly why he's been brought into the tent and that is because he was a very he was a sort of awkward squad backbencher who was head of the Home Affairs Committee and Tony Blair's

job offer to him is essentially is just to bring him in and ensure that he he can't cause any more trouble on the backbenches and shut him up for a bit.

So there's this tension throughout his period as a minister, two periods as a minister which are covered in this volume, of him being inside the government and having been very much sort of resenting it in a lot of ways.

He actually starts it it off trying to turn down the job and is persuaded by Tony Bear, who he refers to all the way through in capitals as the man, which is psycho.

I think that's a good feature of lots of biographies.

In fact, story in general requires your protagonist to be...

So Blackout is a perfect example of it, right?

Because he's in the middle of most of the systems he's in.

There is someone to kick Baldrick and there is someone above him who is...

Kicked by.

Yeah, there's the general, there's the prince, or whoever.

And so that's a perfect example of that, where there's a tension and a a structure.

You're not getting a view right from the top.

I think it's always much, much more interesting to hear from slightly more junior people and slightly more outside people than it is from extremely polished performers who've got an eye to their post-ministerial career and what boards they're going to sit on, certainly.

That's what I think.

It's not just a kind of Rosencrantz and Guildenstein a dead thing, which is part of it, right?

Is that it's actually more interesting to see the sideways view onto the kind of very big events.

But I also think most successful, really successful politicians do not have a lot of self-reflection and self-doubt.

It is not something that is an asset in politics.

I just interviewed Tony Blair a couple of weeks ago, and he's such a convincing advocate for whatever he's doing because he doesn't look in the rear view mirror constantly and rack his brains over all the things that could have gone wrong.

And I think you have to have that personality type, that very charismatic, always looking forward.

I think people would say the same about Thatcher, right?

That she didn't look backwards.

She was always onto the next thing.

It was forward.

And I think that characteristic makes you a very bad writer.

So by definition, I think Chris Mullen is probably a good writer, but all the things that made him a good writer probably made him a bad minister.

Particularly Mrs.

Thatcher's legendary self-absorbed.

I remember Charles Moore, who wrote the very, very good three-volume, The Authorised Life of Mrs.

Thatcher, saying that he was once having a family lunch with Mrs.

Thatcher, and some small children came and pressed their faces against the window and sort of, you know, waved.

And Mrs.

Thatcher was completely flummoxed and just said,

what are they doing?

Why are they behaving in that way?

And Charles said that she clearly, despite having been a mother and lived, you know, 70s up a lot, had no idea of the way in which small children behaved and what they did if you let them out of the room and they were kind of wavy.

And this was completely baffling to her, that they might as well have been, you know, sort of apes jumping up and down.

And again, it's the self-absorption, the complete focus.

You know, the only thing is the light burning at the end of the tunnel that you're moving towards.

And

it needs a special kind of

ammanuensis or chronicler or

observer, I think, to bring that off.

Probably.

What I was going to mention, actually, sort of apropos, and again, he stands in a quite interesting relation to the people that he's writing about, is Woodrow Wyatt's three volumes of political diaries.

Because Wyatt, although Wyatt was an absolute...

I don't know who he was, because I'm afraid all I'm getting is probably a Tory minister and father of Petrono.

No, no, father of Petrona.

Now, Woodrow Wyatt is a very interesting case because he was a right-wing Labour MP in the 50s and 60s, lost his seat in 1970,

and then converted in a, well, he was actually a cross-bench peer, but an absolute acolyte of Mrs.

Thatcher's, and helped write her speeches.

And as soon as Thatcher went, immediately transferred himself to John Major and was his kind of factotum, and fixed Major up with Rupert Murdoch.

And, you know, and it was, so was actually sort of, is never mentioned in anybody's memoirs.

I think he gets one mention in Mrs.

Thatcher's two volumes, which I think he would have been very sad about.

But he's always there, and he sees them in their most sort of intimate moments.

He's very self-centered.

He's always out, you know, for what Woodrow

can get out of these.

But you do get sort of unguarded moments where Major will suddenly drop his mask of niceness and say something really quite catty about someone like John Prescott.

And there really is a sense, there is a sense of terrible sense of corruption, obviously, and sleaziness and things happening because people in offices in the city pick up the phone to their friend, the Tory Minister, and sorting things.

But

it's tremendously a ferret, I suppose.

If you read the Chips Channon, the giant Simon Heffer edited volumes of his diaries?

Because from what I read of the reviews of that, they said he's just a figure on the periphery of lots of extraordinary stuff.

I would have said my own view of him, of Chips, would be that

he never amounted to anything politically, despite his ambitions.

And so, although he's,

you know, there's an awful lot of names turn up, and that he's quite perceptive, I think, about some of the people he comes across.

But you're really, in terms of the really big issues, you're only getting crumbs, I think, from the tables of the great.

That would be my thought.

I don't know what you think.

Is there another thing about whether or not these people are likable to the reader?

Does it matter?

Because a lot of the people we've described are writing unpleasant things about friends, colleagues, partners, whatever it is.

They don't all come across very well.

You're in a room full of journalists.

We're not going to complain about that.

Do they have to have the courage to be unpleasant in order to guarantee a good book?

I suppose what I would say about that is that you have to import into this, if we're talking about personae, which is what ultimately it's all about, about, you have to import into this the literary idea, I suppose, the Anthony Pohl idea of the personal myth.

If you can gauge, either through the memoir or through the biography, what it was that they thought was important about themselves and what they were trying to project through, and the way in which their lives, politically or non-politically, were made bearable to them by the kind of myths about themselves that they projected, then that's interesting.

And it makes even the most abrasive or unpromising-looking subject appear interesting.

I mean, it's like, you know, I mean, take someone like John Prescott, whom no political memoirist of the time has a good word for.

Even John Major loathed Prescott.

You know,

you get this in the Woodrow Wyatt diaries.

But, you know, Prescott had his personal myth.

You know, he had the personal myth, he had the chip, he had the upbringing, he had.

And you can see him kind of projecting it through his political life with sometimes very unfortunate results, but sometimes with results that are amusing, and sometimes results that tell you a great deal about Prescott and the way that he sort of conceived of himself and I find this is very useful it's like you know it's like the James Callahan was exactly the same

I mean I remember and this is a sunny gym in the memoir isn't it when he's as a he's also shocking

about all the people that he hates let me tell you a story which is in highly germane because it it's to do with the crossland memoir that um i you know that we were just talking about and when i was a boy of 17 at school Callahan turned up at Norwich Cathedral and it was decided that he ought to be introduced to the young friends of Norwich Cathedral.

Now, I wasn't a young friend, but my friend Crispin was, and he dragged me along and said, come on, we're a bit short, come and say hello to the Prime Minister.

So there I was on a Saturday morning at the end of a line of teenagers shaking hands with Callaghan.

So he stopped and he looked, I remember this so vividly, and he looked at me and he went,

so what are you going to do?

You know,

to which I said, as you would at that age, I said, I'm thinking of going to Oxford, Prime Minister.

So Callahan looked at me and he looked suddenly wistful and crestfallen and he said to me,

there are other places you know

and then you know went off down the line and I thought, well, that's a bit odd.

And then five years later I read Susan Crossland's book, which contains the account of Callahan sitting in cabinet with Crossland and all the Oxford firsts who constituted the Wilson and Callahan cabinets and saying, very, you know, saying, I suppose you all think that if I'd been to Oxford, I'd have got a second.

And Crossland immensely patronisingly says, well, no, Jim, actually, you'd have probably got a first because you do actually have this ability to kind of separate out.

And obviously, I was collateral in a war that I didn't know was being fought.

And that was why Callahan said to me, there are other places, you know, and carried on down the line.

And again, he is supposed when he arrived at 10 Downing Street, in this is not in his memoirs, I think it might, I think it's in his, might be in Bernard O'Donoghue's book, but when he arrives at 10 Downing Street, he sits down at his desk and turned to his aide and said, There are many cleverer people than me at the Labour Party, but I am here and they are there.

Which is a bit

incredible, like defensiveness coming up.

Can I ask, and maybe this is a question for both of you, but maybe Adam more, which is, what is the bitchiest of the 70s memoirs?

Because there is a period of

an exquisite period of beef.

Glimmers of Twilight, Joe Haynes, 2003.

It's at least his second volume of biography about working with Harold Wilson.

But it's the one where he really decides.

I mean, possibly not every city.

He was press secretary, yeah, yeah.

And part of that, sort of being a cabinet along with Bernard Donnie, who you mentioned, and Marcia Falklander, Marcia Williams, sorry, Lady Falkinder.

And the big revelation in the 2003 book, which he hadn't talked to mention up until that point, was that there was actually a murder plot.

But at some point, Harold Wilson's personal physician, Joe Stone, proposed doing away with his political,

and he could make it look like an overdose, which is just quite extraordinary.

And he's still at it.

So again, it was Joe Haynes, who is about 5,000 years old now, who popped up quite recently.

Again, with the story about that Harold Wilson was having an affair with

another one, another member of his staff.

There's a Harold Wilson rehabilitation going on at the moment.

There's a starma-esque context for this.

And Wilson, of course, he was derided in the years after he had been Prime Minister.

But I can just see there are moves afoot to rehabilitate him.

Can I also just say, just for listeners reading us who may be thinking of reading up on this stuff, do not read Marcia Williams, Lady Falklander's own biography of her time in Downing Street, which is even called Downing Street in Perspective, which tells you everything about how boring a panodyne it's going to be.

It almost actually sort of smells of kind of

eau de parfum, doesn't it?

It's a very delicate little book.

It's very weirdly, thankfully, very short, unlike some of the memoirs from that period, one convention.

Here's a thing.

I mean, who knows?

Some of our listeners might be people who were MPs until recently.

Some of those people may be writing books even now.

about the last 14 years.

What advice would you give to someone who's trying to put together a cracking political memoir?

Put the dirty bits in.

That's what we want, is the gossip.

I mean that's what with what we come away from this.

You know, what you want is the personalities, the fallings out and the bitchiness.

Now doesn't that contradict what DJ was saying about the celebrification of the memoir?

Is there any way we can reclaim the heights of you know you only found it?

My advice to anybody sitting down with this in mind would be don't let on what you're doing.

Never give the faintest indication that you are taking notes, that you have any interest in this kind of thing at all, because it's the um

it's the outsider, it's the complete unknown, it's the unthought-of candidate.

I think sometimes who produces the best kind of book.

I think you have to decide whether or not you're trying to write an apology for your life and perspective, right, or if you're trying to write an actually objective, interesting, honest book.

Because there is a value in both of them.

I think that what DJ was saying about the kind of personal myth-making is really true.

I do kind of want to understand what was in Tony Blair's mind as the war over Iraq approached.

That's fundamentally quite interesting.

But it's not the same as getting a kind of much more objective assessment.

So I think what I've learned is you maybe do a mix of reading memoir and biography because you will, you know, it is interesting to see inside a person's head, but it also inevitably is quite limited.

Have you got a pick, Andy?

It's Nadine Dorrie's The Plot.

Obviously.

I have such a great book in so many ways.

Just the way that it's basically Nadine's series of coffees in Five Hartford Street, which she puts in every single time I switch the Otter transcription app on in my phone.

It's a really unnecessary level of detail about all the journalism that she did in this kind of really excited way.

Oh no,

that's not my pick, obviously.

It's

Breaking the Code by Giles Brandreth,

who was before

he was Mr.

Cuddley Jumpers and Teddies, who was an MP for Chester between 1992 and 1997.

before which he was also Mr.

Cuddley Jumpers and Teddies on morning TV.

So it's a very bizarre brief political career that he had.

This kind of hits both our marks, doesn't it?

Because it's that sort of insider-y-outsider review.

And if I know anything about Darles Granath, it's going to be very, very gossipy and name-dropping.

Exactly.

It's a really good book.

I mean,

it's big, but

it's sort of off-puttingly big.

But actually, if you want a book about the collapse of the 90s major government, it gets it because he doesn't have anything to lose.

Firstly, he knows he's going to lose his sense.

So you really want someone who's got no further ambition at the point of writing this.

It's in diary format,

it's in real time.

So he, and I think he said afterwards, one of the keys is to write it on the day, because otherwise you start tidying and you start improving.

You think, I'll just sound that off and all of this.

If you write it on the day, you really do get it.

And it's during this phenomenally unsuccessful time.

And that's always more interesting to read than the years where everything's going magnificently and you're just, you know, getting on with it.

But it's, you know, it's the time of David Meller and Stephen Shagger Norris and his five mistresses.

And all of it's a time of, you know, every

page practice we're so base, so that's what we want to read about, basically, is just downing street jagging.

It's terrible, it's a really interesting time of every page is another disaster, and he's reacting to it saying,

What?

Steve Norris!

And it's just so you're getting a proper, a fresh emotional reaction from him, which is interesting, right?

But I would defend that because I think the thing about politics is that it's a bit like the way that you know economics in the 20th century had belief that everybody acted rationally and you could work out systems, and then they went, oh, actually, most of the time people are acting in in very irrational ways.

Politics is a mess about that, which is that

everything would go well if only people didn't keep doing stupid things.

And so, it's really interesting to find out all the ways, all the human fallibilities.

Like you say, it is just the person who's had an affair with their secretary that then tanks an incredibly important policy, or they don't get to talk about it because

someone assaulted a goose on a highway and that dominates the news agenda for a week.

That's why I think these things are brilliant, because they talk about the way the best laid plans end up crumbling in the face of just weird and stupid things that humans do.

Yeah.

And the justification for the book being interesting in a political way, apart from all the gossip, is that Brandreth was in the Whips office and the Whips office, the ways of the Whips were very secretive for almost the entire 20th century.

You know, it was not really a known thing.

And that's why the book is called Breaking the Code.

It's also really rude about lots of people in a way that you probably wouldn't publish today about people's looks and things like that.

It's quite...

I've reread a few bits of went, oh, that is

offensive.

It is genuinely, really, really rude about Harriet Harmon, or whatever.

And so,

yeah, yeah, that's quite useful in a way because it also does tell you what

the actual untidied-up way that people were talking about stuff.

And like in reflection, I wrote a profile of Harriet Harmon a couple of years ago.

And if you go back to the clippings about her, they are just so unbelievably offensive.

You know, she's shrill, she's whiny, she's obsessive.

And you'd just be like, Sorgan used to call her Hattie Har person.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a lot of that, and then about how she was, you know, women's rights, obsessive.

But you get to then, like, by revisiting unvarnished versions of the past rather than what everyone would like to say that they were doing, you go, okay, yeah, like

you know, the homophobia of the 70s, the incredible sexism that Harmon faced, you actually get to confront that kind of head-on.

Okay, so as you, the listener, head off to your desert island or wherever you're going, you can take with you these four books.

Charles Brandis, Breaking the Code, Susan Crossland's Life of Tony Crossland, Chris Mullins, Are You from the Foothills, Nancy Mitford's The Sun King.

And you're definitely going to be over your baggage allowance.

So that's it for this summer book special.

Hope you've enjoyed it.

We will be back with more topical material in a fortnight's time.

Who knows what it'll be about?

Find out then.

Until then, go and buy the magazine or subscribe at private-i.co.uk.

Thanks to Adam, Helen, and DJ.

And to the producer, Matt Hill of Rethink Audio.

And to you for listening.

Bye for now.

Falls a time to plan ahead and ensure your brand shows up in ways that matter.

4Imprint's promotional products work as hard as you do and make a lasting impression.

From quality apparel, including exclusive brands, to drinkwear, tech, and totes, they've got thousands of options to fit your brand and budget.

Plus, you get free samples, expert help, and their 360-degree guarantee.

So you'll be 4Imprint certain everything shows up just right, right on time.

Explore more at 4imprint.com.

4Imprint, for certain.

Kate Farm's high-protein nutrition shakes are built for real change.

Plant-based, clinically developed, and made to support your health goals.

Not just protein, purposeful fuel.

Available on Amazon and KateFarms.com.

What if Juliet got a second chance at life after Romeo and Juliet, created by the Emmy-winning writer from Schitt's Creek and Pop Music's number one hitmaker, playing October 7th through 12th at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts.