Our vote for the best politics books of the year

Unleashed by Boris Johnson (William Collins £30, 784pp)

POST-MARGARET Thatcher, no politician has so utterly and irredeemably divided opinion as Boris Johnson has. Love him or loathe him, two things about the man are undeniable. First, that he never does anything by halves – hence this memoir runs to nearly 800 pages and is longer than James Joyce’s Ulysses. Second, that he is a fine writer, with a command of the English language that makes him a pleasure to read.

It’s full of anecdote and analysis, intimate moments, revelation and confession. He tells it as he sees it – ‘Keir Starmer would do his puzzled/irritable face, like a bullock having a thermometer unexpectedly shoved up its rectum’ – and you can’t help but snigger.

He denies charges of breaching lockdown rules – ‘I saw no cake. I ate no blooming cake. If this was a party, it was the feeblest in the history of human festivity’ – but admits a mistake in not stamping down on the gossip.

He is painfully honest about how close he came to death – ‘lying in Intensive Care, banjaxed with Covid, I didn’t want to sleep – in case I never woke up’. He is scathing about those in his party who, in the end, did in with him – ‘Surely, I told myself, Tory MPs wouldn’t be so dumb as to get rid of me? Surely not . . .’

This may not be political memoir in the sombre manner of grandiose predecessors like Harold Macmillan and Mrs T, but it is essential reading for understanding the drama of the past five years. And it’s a lot of fun.

Ten Years To Save the West by Liz Truss (Biteback £10.99, 368pp)

LIZ Truss was a woman on a mission. ‘I am not one of those who think the job of politicians is to manage whatever consensus they find when they take office and go with the flow. The job of political leaders is to lead.’

She boldly set out to break the mould, but she was the one who ended up broken. Her mini-budget – full of maxi-proposals – backfired, the economy hiccupped and she was driven out after just 49 days in what she believes was a coup.

Truss didn’t regret leaving the place she had quickly come to hate – it was soulless, flea-ridden, noisy, claustrophobic. But she did regret the lost opportunity to change the direction in which the country was going and steer it back to what she saw as proper Conservative values.

She blames the Tory Party for losing its way, opting for high-tax, interventionist government that expands the role of the state, that veers towards green dogma and wokery. ‘Left-wing arguments are indulged by those who should be fighting them,’ she writes.

She came to believe ‘these people would rather a Labour government elected than a Conservative Party enact truly conservative policies. They were the enemy within.’ If so, they got their wish.

Keir Starmer by Tom Baldwin (William Collins £16.99, 496pp)

JUST who is Keir Starmer? Groundbreaking leader? Grandstanding student politician? Lefty lawyer? Honest man? Hypocrite? These are questions that – as he approaches six months as Prime Minister – many electors are still struggling with.

This meticulously researched and superbly written biography fills us in on the back story: the toolmaker dad, the sick but strong and influential mum, the climb up the social ladder via grammar school and Oxford, the barrister dedicated to human rights.

Author Tom Baldwin is a respected journalist and, as a former Labour apparatchik, a self-confessed sympathiser, who was given exceptional access to his subject – though the end product, we are assured, is neither ‘authorised’ nor ‘approved’.

To be fair, the result is certainly no hagiography – it acknowledges flaws, criticisms and controversy. Ultimately, it gives Starmer the benefit of the doubt as a good guy.

But even Baldwin finds himself stumped at times: ‘I like and trust Keir but sometimes find him hard to fathom.’ He sees him as a creature of ambiguity, nuance and complexity, for whom ‘there is always a but’. And yet also as a man ‘driven by a ruthless determination, taking informed risks, and with an exceptional understanding of strategic purpose’.

Or is ‘strategic’ just a polite way of justifying the many U-turns and broken promises since July? On this, as he launches a reset on the reset, downgrading ‘missions’ to ‘milestones’, the jury is out.

Blue Ambition by Michael Ashcroft (Biteback £20, 288pp)

AS THE latest leader of the Tory Party – the fifth in five years – Kemi Badenoch is already proving a ferocious opponent at Prime Minister’s Questions, giving as good as she gets (and more) in face-offs with Sir Keir Starmer. But standing her ground against lefties is in her DNA.

As a student at Sussex University, being black and having come to this country from Nigeria as essentially an immigrant, she found that the ideologically-driven militants of the Marxist Society who dominated campus culture expected her to naturally be in their camp. They couldn’t believe it when she refused to back their ban of Coca-Cola and the Daily Mail.

That’s when she identified as a Tory, reacting against what she described as ‘the spoiled, entitled, privileged, metropolitan elite-in-training’. Her early contempt for ignorant armchair activists who spouted Left-wing nonsense while having no knowledge of the real world would remain with her and influence her politics.

She was quickly identified by the Tories as someone with star potential and entered the Commons as an MP in 2017. Ministerial and Cabinet positions followed, a meteoric rise that has led to her being seen by some as the saviour of conservatism in Britain after this year’s General Election rout.

She continues to reject the very concept of positive discrimination, challenging what she sees as the lazy pigeon-holing of black people by those on the Left. She maintains: ‘Britain is the least racist country on earth’. Ashcroft commends her as fearless with ‘an electric quality and an energy that most front-rank figures in Westminster do not possess’.

Making the Weather by Vernon Bogdanor (Haus £22, 368pp)

DON’T be deceived by the title – this is not another treatise on climate change. It is a stimulating and controversial book identifying six politicians who, while they never made it to Downing Street, in the eyes of the eminent and always readable constitutional historian Professor Vernon Bogdanor, profoundly changed modern Britain with their beliefs.

Nye Bevan, Enoch Powell, Roy Jenkins, Keith Joseph, Tony Benn and now-MP Nigel Farage – they come from all parts of the political spectrum. What they have in common, what makes them special, he says, is that ‘they all sought seriously to confront the problems facing Britain.

All were regarded as mavericks, but all have deeply influenced our lives and continue to do so’ – whether it be Bevan’s pioneering of the NHS, Joseph’s devotion to a market economy as the guru of Thatcherism or Farage’s campaign to detach us from Europe. Each one re-drew the political landscape and fundamentally changed the political weather (hence that title).

The analysis is never less than challenging, the judgments admirably nuanced but to the point.

The Red Emperor by Michael Sheridan (Headline £25, 368pp)

IT TOOK Xi Jinping 37 years to worm his way to the top. From local government, he gravitated to the national stage and, in 2012, aged 59, he emerged as the head of the Communist party.

The following year he became the supreme leader of China – arguably the most powerful leader in the world.

What is not generally known – but is revealed here by veteran foreign correspondent and China expert Michael Sheridan – is that he began at the top, the princeling son of one of Chairman Mao’s closest allies, before a falling out sent the family tumbling into ruin and disgrace.

Fanatical Red Guards threatened him with execution, then paraded him on a stage while they screamed insults at him. Astonishingly, his own mother stood there chanting with them. He survived the ordeal of internal exile, rehabilitated himself and emerged from power struggles as nothing less than

an emperor.

This outstanding book shows that, though China may have transformed from a poor agrarian society to a sophisticated modern state that can launch space probes, make vaccines, wage cyber war, run high-speed trains and build new cities, it has not outgrown its ancient tradition of bowing to emperors.

War by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster £25, 448pp)

THE world is in a perilous state, with conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine threatening a slide into war that could engulf us all. In these circumstances, there can be no better guide to how we got here than the most authoritative of journalists, Bob Woodward, who with Carl Bernstein exposed the scandal of Watergate and brought down crooked President Nixon.

Though now in his 80s, he has lost none of his thirst for truth, nor that ‘Deep Throat’ skill that gets the players who matter to open up to him.

With astonishing ‘fly-on-the-wall’ detail, we are led through Putin’s lies, the White House missteps that failed to stop his invasion of Ukraine, the ratcheting up of arms and the chilling whispers of nuclear weaponry. And, if that isn’t bad enough, then the Middle East ignites into a situation heading who knows where.

Woodward believes Joe Biden – urging restraint – did pretty well, not a widely held view.

In this uncertain world, the only thing we can be sure of is that Woodward’s dispatch, however insightful, is only an interim one. This story, for good or ill, will run and run.

Goodbye to Russia by Sarah Rainsford (Bloomsbury £22, 368pp)

Rainsford is a familiar face as a BBC foreign correspondent reporting from Russia, a country she has been passionate about since her time as a student there. But this love affair went terribly wrong. She had high hopes for its future in the aftermath of communism, only to have a front-row seat as the ruthless, corrupt Putin regime relentlessly crushed all dissent.

Hers is a personal story – eloquently told – of trying to report the unvarnished truth and giving a voice to the persecuted band of dissenters while being harassed, threatened and blatantly lied to, culminating in her expulsion on the nonsense charge of being an enemy agent.

She has since become a witness to the evils played out in Ukraine, describing through gritted teeth the corpses piling up following Putin’s invasion.

As for Russia itself, Rainsford admits: ‘After almost a quarter of a century with Putin in charge, there is little left that does not seem tainted. I do hope, though, there will be another Russia one day – one that is comfortable enough in its own skin to leave others in peace.’