My blog

Tag: Book reviews

  • Book review: Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge

    Christopher Jackson

     

    This is a fabulous book written by a man who thought he might be prime minister but who has instead become Britain’s premier political podcaster. It always used to be said during the Cameron years that Stewart was the easiest man to get an interview with – perhaps he has always been a creature of the media.

    But this book tells us what it’s like to be a person of real interest and imagination caught up in Westminster and ministerial life. “Stop being so interesting,” as Liz Truss, then environment secretary, had said to her junior minister. Skilled at taking her own advice, it was never to be expected that Stewart would be able to follow suit. By the time he arrived in Parliament he had already walked Afghanistan on foot.

    Anybody who can do that might not particularly enjoy being reined in by parliamentary whips. Stewart was always an unlikely MP – and an especially unlikely Conservative MP, not least because he had voted Labour in his teens. He was a man whose life had already attained filmic proportions by the time he was representing the lovely constituency of Penrith and the Border. Brad Pitt had taken an option on one of his books.

    This book, an important work of historical documentation, won’t cause a deluge of applications from would-be candidates to Conservative HQ. Here we meet the lordly and embedded civil servant who thinks he knows better than the prisons minister. We see Theresa May – to whom Stewart would be admirably loyal over the ill-fated Chequers agreement – ‘with some of the monarch’s stiff authority’ – offering him a Cabinet position. Overall he would hold six ministerial roles during that turbulent time.

    Stewart is still by turns baffled and angry at Boris Johnson’s premiership and is especially good at pointing out the absurdity of Johnson as a Foreign Secretary: “A man who enjoyed the improbable, the incongruous and the comically over-stated had been trapped in a department whose religion was tact and caution,” he writes.

    Johnson’s ascendancy would turn out to be far briefer than he expected. Stewart would probably have stood a good chance of becoming leader under different rules; he was certainly the best debater in the field in 2019. It wasn’t to be – in this book Stewart alikens his predicament against the European Research Group as being like a book club at a Millwall Game. He was up against those who had spent a lifetime thinking about the perfidy of Europe – and, in the case of Sir Bill Cash, thinking about nothing else.

    The final verdict is a grim one: “Nine years in politics had been a shocking education in lack of seriousness. I had begun by noticing how grotesquely unqualified so many of us were for the offices we were given,” Stewart writes. This book will also not do the impossible and rehabilitate Britain’s shortest-serving PM: “I had found, working for Liz Truss, a culture that prized campaigning over careful governing, opinion polls over detailed policy debates, announcements over implementation. I felt that we had collectively failed to respond adequately to every major challenge of the past 15 years: the financial crisis, the collapse of the liberal ‘global order’, public despair and the polarisation of Brexit.” So back to the media then – where politicians increasingly seem happier in any case.

     

  • Review: The Letters of Seamus Heaney

    Christopher Jackson

     

    I don’t think any writer would in their right mind refuse the Nobel Prize for Literature, but there is a lot in this book to make one wonder whether it might be the right course of action should Stockholm call.

    However busy Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) – ‘famous Seamus’ as Clive James dubbed him – might have been before he was awarded the prize in 1996, life was a constant deluge of correspondence from that point on. ‘In the last two days I have written 32 letters,’ Heaney writes to the artist Barrie Cooke in 1985, ‘all of them a weight that was lying on my mind even as the accursed envelopes lay week by week on my desk. The trouble is I have 32 more to write…’ Of course, he’s too generous to point out that Cooke is by definition in the second tranche of 32.

    All poets must carry out administration, but if every one of those letters could have been a poem, this book measures out a sort of loss – the replacement of the actual work by the business of being, to use Yeats’ phrase, ‘the smiling public man’.

    Heaney had a terrific set of cards: supportive parents; warm friends; and above all, an ideal wife in the academic Marie Heaney, who bore him three adored children. Marie was the centre of his existence, but no letters to her are included here, though they certainly exist. She is still alive, and it seems likely that there will be a subsequent volume after she passes to round out the picture.

    This is therefore a tale of considerable success which was ordained, one feels, from the first. In poetry, the premier publishing house is probably still Faber and Faber, as it was in Heaney’s lifetime – a legacy of the role TS Eliot played in building up the original poetry list. It has probably gone down a bit since then since independent publishing is on the rise generally, and the books don’t quite have the caché they once did.

    In Heaney’s day to be asked to submit to Faber – not to come cap in hand – was rare. This book begins in 1964 with Heaney in his early twenties doing just that. We start then at the crest of a lifelong wave of success: Death of a Naturalist was published in 1966, and has never been off the syllabus since. Famous friendships accrued: Ted Hughes, Czeslaw Milosz, Tom Paulin, Michael Longley and so forth.

    It is also a tale of mentorship: Heaney could never resist lending a supportive voice to young poets, perhaps knowing his luck in having been elevated above his peers even from a young age. It was a network of support in relation to the endeavour of an art form which is at once charmed and economically hopeless. Even well-known poets need shoring up. ‘Poetry is small beer,’ as W.H. Auden observed. The readership is always small, and predominantly confined to fellow poets. Even Heaney, who achieved a Tiger Woods level of success, died with an estate matched by many middling solicitors. Tiger Woods himself has a yacht big enough to play golf on.

    It was always kind of him to write back to poets who needed it; this book shows us that he made so many peoples’ days. To get a letter from him would, for many poets, have constituted an instant trip to the framers. That he did this is wholly admirable.

    And I don’t think his doing it can easily be separated out from the quality of the poems, which emanate out of that same generosity of spirit. There is a kind of glow to Heaney’s poems which is to do with a good heart mining the world for consolation. These letters are like that too – and they show him to be a willing citizen in the republic of letters.

    Poetry, and increasingly, literature itself isn’t a career. What is a career is to teach in a university, and publish books on the side which sell to an audience of 200 if you’re lucky. Heaney knew that the ship of his success had created dinghy-loads of unread poets in its wake. Perhaps there was guilt to that – but if so, he converted that guilt into this special book.

     

  • Book Review: Richard Osman’s The Last Devil to Die

    Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series is very popular – don’t underestimate it, writes Christopher Jackson

    In our age, there is an increasing suspicion that reading isn’t really that popular a pursuit at all. If we ask why this might be, we can alight on the Internet and television as explanations – but only partially. It is no coincidence that at the same time that the novel has declined, many newspapers are in thrall to the notion of ‘literary fiction’. This umbrella term, unhelpful as it is, broadly refers to writers who have no interest in story or character but are instead ‘noted for their prose’. Really they’re writing poetry without form or rhyme.

    One might legitimately add that almost all these writers are of the left and therefore coming at the world with a series of preconceived ideas about things: the passivity of their prose feels allied to an inherited world view. Independent thought cedes to long waffly passages of description, where the psychological condition of a character is told not by exposure to event but as one-noted perception.

    We’ve forgotten what’s difficult – to tell a good story and to show how people really go through the world. In certain circles you can be met with gales of hatred if you say you prefer CJ Sansom to Ian McEwan as I do, or Ursula K. Le Guin to Zadie Smith; but I am prepared to take this a step further and announce to an astonished world that I prefer Richard Osman to Salman Rushdie.

    Within the world of books which are actually fun to read, the hardest of all genres is crime fiction. The main reason for this is that you are writing for an audience largely made up of people who have read thousands of such novels before. They’re a tough crowd. In addition to this, you have to work within a formula – in the same way that a formal poet will be caught up in metre and rhyme, the writer of murder mystery must have a victim and a murderer, a series of clues and red herrings, and at least one desirable detective. To do all this successfully is sufficiently rare for readers to want to punch the air when they encounter it.

    Richard Osman’s achievement in The Thursday Murder Club series is to create funny and joyful narratives in a genre which you might think of as staid. Simultaneously he manages to say something definitely true about human nature: you shouldn’t count out the old.

    The Thursday Murder Club series is set in a Kent retirement village and is now into its fourth book. In order of publication, these are: The Thursday Murder Club (2020), The Man Who Died Twice (2021), The Bullet that Missed (2022), and the new book The Last Devil to Die (2023). The inspiration behind the books was delightfully simple. Osman, best known for being the presenter of TV’s Pointless, was visiting his mother at one such place, having lunch with her and her intelligent friends, and he looked around and thought: “This is a perfect place for a murder.” Then came the ensuing thought: “And I bet these old folk would be the ones to solve it.”

    What is good about the conception is that it reminds us that we tend to look through the old when we really shouldn’t. Almost by definition they know more than we do – even if, as one character does in the series, they’re beginning to lose their marbles. Osman knows that dementia is a terrible thing, but it is also a kind of experience and therefore a kind of wisdom.

    In a world where judges retire at 70, and accountants somewhat earlier, these books can be read as a quiet broadside to the way we treat the elderly: in forgetting what they did for us, we also forget what they’re now capable of.

    The Thursday Murder Club itself consists of Elizabeth, a retired spook, who is very much the ring-leader; her best friend the widow Joyce, through whose eyes we see many events in the books; Ibrahim, a gay retired psychotherapist; and Ron, a left-wing divorcee, whose boxer son Jason also features from time to time in the books.

    It is worth sampling Joyce’s voice to get an idea of the comedy of Osman’s world:

    We’ve had the most wonderful New Year’s bash. We drank, we counted down to midnight and watched the fireworks on TV. We sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’, Ron fell over a coffee table, and we all went home.

    The humour is almost always dropped in like this, incidental to the plot – or perhaps bundled in with it. We can see the comedy of Ron falling over, but it rushes past us and doesn’t hold us up: this is what distinguishes the books from those of, say, PG Wodehouse, where we are always building towards set pieces like the Gussy Fink-Nottle prizegiving scene in Right Ho, Jeeves. Wodehouse is pure knockabout comedy; Osman’s laughs are part of the fabric of a world where crime occurs.

    The crimes themselves lead onto another set of characters – specifically Chris and Donna, the likeable detectives whose love lives the Thursday Murder Club quartet also mind about. Chris has been given Osman’s own eating addiction, which the writer has been open about in interview. The image of the police which the books gives is broadly favourable – but then this is to be expected of a writer whose overall view of humanity is generous. In fact, if it comes to that he’s generous also to the criminals. Here is a representative passage about Mitch Maxwell in The Last Devil to Die who is probably Osman’s funniest creation to date:


    Here’s the thing. It’s a great deal easier being interviewed by the police than another criminal. Mitch Maxwell has been interviewed by the police many times, and their resources and opportunities are limited. Everything is on tape, your overpaid solicitor gets to sit next to you shaking her head at the questions, and, by law, they have to make you a cup of tea.

    Sometimes this sort of writing has led critics, who should be enjoying the books, to tut and say that Osman doesn’t in the end take crime very seriously at all. Personally, I think he is just a better writer than the people writing about him. Who’s to say that it’s not slightly annoying to be a book reviewer dealing in prose – and perhaps with an unpublished novel or two sitting in the desk drawer – and to find that a mere TV man can write so well?

    The other magnificent thing about these books is that because we’re dealing with a group of elderly detectives, we get a sense of how much time matters. The action across all four books probably takes place over a mere calendar year. This means that a new set of murders is usually kicking off a matter of weeks after the previous. This creates a sense that the characters are packing lots into their lives, and we feel we might emulate this in ours, even if we’re not solving murders ourselves.

    But this is not to say that Osman turns his attention away from the aging process: without wishing to give spoiler alerts, in The Last Devil to Die, he confronts it head on with great wisdom and tenderness. About the plot itself I shall say little for fear of giving it away. But in this book Elizabeth, the leader of the gang, is undergoing some personal difficulties which mean that Joyce now takes centre stage in solving the murders: the Thursday Murder Club is evolving over time. I was pleased to see we also get to know Ibrahim better in this book too.

    Naturally, we mustn’t go too far. Osman isn’t Shakespeare; the real poetic pleasures aren’t to be found in these books as they might be in those rare literary novels which tell exciting stories. But the joy they give is far better than what we’re all too often faced with in literary fiction today: no joy at all.

  • Book review: Ronel Lehmann reviews Dame Esther Rantzen’s Older and Bolder

    Ronel Lehmann

     

    I often remind our student candidates that it is normal to be nervous before an interview. At their age, I was so very fortunate to shadow Esther Rantzen from her green room to live broadcast on BBC That’s Life and Hearts of Gold. The minute before she waited to walk on to receive rapturous live audience applause, you could see stage fright kick in and the shear look of terror on her face. Of course, it was all gone as quick as it arrived once the programme titles started rolling. It is good that in her golden years, she is still inspiring the next generation with her wisdom.

    Her sixth book Over entitled “Older & Bolder” is crammed with advice, gleaned from her own experience, what she has learned as a journalist, author and broadcaster, and from what she has been told on the rare occasions when she has actually listened to somebody else who turned out to be worth hearing.

    This energising book charts her time travels through her most significant memories, from meeting Princess Diana to creating a national outrage with a mischievous short film about a driving dog and reflects with candour and humour on the life lessons she has learned, revealing the hints, hacks and personal philosophies that have been her secrets to surviving almost everything.

    We may not all achieve what Dame Esther has, but here we can soak up her wisdom, laughter and learn from her, embracing the passing years and march boldly on.

    Over a career spanning five decades Dame Esther Rantzen has appeared in more than 2,000 television broadcasts, in her regular contributions to political and news programmes, including The One Show, she especially advocates protecting vulnerable people and growing old ungracefully. She is also a reality TV favourite with appearances on Strictly Come Dancing, First Dates, and I’m a Celebrity. As a journalist, she writes for the Daily mail, the Guardian, the Telegraph and The Times.

    She was awarded a DBE in 2015 for her services to children and older people, through her pioneering work as founder of Childline and The Silver Line.

    I am still in touch with Dame Esther today. Sadly, she was recently diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. Her quote “Remember that history is written by the survivors, be bolder as you grow older and make sure you float above any challenges that threaten to overwhelm you,” will resonate with all those who have had the privilege of meeting or working with her and the audiences of tens of millions who avidly placed their trust in her during a career spanning five decades.

    Her generosity of spirit to others less fortunate will always live on.

    Older and Bolder: My A-Z of Surviving Almost Everything is out now from Penguin Books

  • Armando Iannucci’s Pandemonium: “quite funny – but only quite”

    Christopher Jackson

     

    Say, heaving Muse, what catalogue of restraints

    And luckless lockdowns fell upon th’unwilling world

    Accompanied by pain and stifled shouts of family grief

    Till the world’s wisest company of brethren

    In stately halls and candelabra’d chambers flush

    At their desks with freshest data

    Brought an end to that wailing noise

    And comfort to those begging for release.

    So begins Armando Iannucci’s mock-epic poem about the pandemic. This book deserves to be read as a companion piece – or perhaps antidote – to Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries. Iannucci has by this stage of his career earned our attention no matter what he does.

    It might be noted that his satire has always touched on people in jobs when they have no real business being there. From Alan Partridge’s ludicrous claims to television stardom, to the spads who stalk the corridors of Whitehall in The Thick of It and In the Loop, he has always specialised in showing up people who have an unwarranted sense of belonging in roles to which they aren’t suited. The joke about Partridge isn’t just that he’s a bad television presenter; it’s that there’s not decent reason for him to be on television at all. Likewise, Malcom Tucker is a bully in Whitehall, but he would be a bully in a law firm too: his moral being infects everyone around him: he has no business being anywhere near the decision-making process.

    One might say of Iannucci what Hazlitt said of Shakespeare: that in one sense he is no moralist, but that in another sense he is one of the greatest of moralists. He will show you the most disgusting and corrupt people out there – but by showing them to you he’ll convert that disgust to laughter and a better world. Iannucci is one of the most important civilising forces in our world today.

    My sense is that Pandemonium is destined to be a minor work however. You can see from the passage quoted above that while Iannucci is a student of Milton – and throughout this poem shows himself to be familiar with Alexander Pope’s Dunciad – that mock poetry simply isn’t as effective a tool as television as a means of satire.

    This is because the form itself (the poetry) is a distraction from the subject matter (the pandemic). With good television, of course, we hardly consider the medium at all, which is its strength. In Pandemonium, the matter would be helped if the lines were in an even meter but the first line beginning ‘Say, heaving Muse’ is a very ugly alexandrine leading to a tetrameter in line six with ‘At their desks with freshest data’. This last line also happens to be the strongest line in the passage, making me think that a rhyming tetrameter would have been a better choice of form. Coincidentally, this was the meter used by Pushkin in Eugene Onegin – the last poem to really pull this sort of thing off.

    Having said that, over time you get used to Iannucci’s verse and there is a lot to enjoy about the book once you do. We meet a cast of characters every bit as unfit for their role in the political firmament as the cast of The Thick of It. We meet Boris Johnson as ‘Orbis Rex’ (or ‘World King’) – with the poet pointing out that Orbis also happened to be an anagram of ‘Boris’.

    Say how this hero Boris, seeming felled

    By the evil mite, coughed back up

    His gleaming soul renewed and rode out to fight

    Sadness with mirth…

     

    The idea of Boris Johnson as an immortal being is quite funny – but perhaps only quite. Its limitations come from the fact that the trope comes from ancient poetry and that the joke – like many of the jokes in the book – lack the immediacy of television and so can’t really make us laugh in the same way.

    Compare, for instance, the immortal episode of The Thick of It, about the enquiry into the death of Mr. Tickel. There, at every point, the minutiae of language serves to show the idiocy of many of the characters who made up Blairite Westminster. Then compare it with the scene here where Matt Hancock goes to meet the Circle of Friends, Iannucci’s vivid monster which is intended to mock the class of party donors about whom we heard a lot in relation to PPE and other aspects of policy-making during the pandemic:

     

    So these Friends coagulated around themselves,

    Each one bait for another, bait upon bait,

    Knowing one another and each one known,

    Till they knew themselves inside out,

    Arses eaten by faces, faeces dropped on eyes,

    Arms reaching into guts, lips retching hands out whole,

    Bodies intimate and knotted like a dungy braid.

    This is meant to be a metaphor for the sort of friendships which happen in and around the donor classes of the Conservative Party. I’m not sure how successful it is. I suspect from Iannucci’s perspective, all these people are drawn to one another since they all hang around power, but without any particular reasons for being there other than the wish to be close to power. If that were the case then their real predicament is not to know each other, except incidentally. My suspicion is that Iannucci isn’t used to building poetic images and so misses the real opportunity to satire.

    The book therefore, though it is written by someone who is an undoubted master in his usual field, has the feel of a first draft at some points. It also contains illustrations which seem to serve the purpose of padding out a short manuscript to book length.

    That said, this is still an enjoyable read, which enlarges your sense of Iannucci as an artist. It feels like a pandemic-specific project – the work of someone severed by Covid from the day job.

     

    Pandemonium by Armando Iannucci is published by Lighthouse, priced at £9.99

  • Review: Matt Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries

    Christopher Jackson

     

    This is a strange book to review since it has been almost entirely superseded by the actions of its ghostwriter. It is axiomatic among book reviewers that you must review the book and nothing external to the book, but that turns out to be impossible here.

    For anybody living without Internet access these past months, here is the sequence of events.

    Matt Hancock was a busy Health Secretary, and former prime ministerial candidate with ambitions to digitise the health service. In late 2019, he began getting reports from Wuhan about a virus which would upend his and all our lives. He was a cheerleader for lockdown, and also – as he goes to considerable lengths to point out throughout this book – a driver of the vaccination programme. In May 2021, he began a marital affair with his aide Gina Coldangelo, and when an embrace between them was somehow – we still don’t know how, or by whom – photographed, Hancock was forced to resign.

    Post-government he famously appeared on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, where he made more friends than some had expected. Pandemic Diaries was intended to continue his rehabilitation. However, it was written in a spirit of what now seems gullible collaboration with the journalist Isabel Oakeshott. In the writing of the book, Oakeshott was given access to all of Hancock’s What’s Apps. After the book was released, Oakeshott, pleading the importance of journalism, handed all the messages over to The Telegraph, who proceeded to publish a series of immensely unflattering stories about Hancock which undid much of the painstaking work of rehabilitation.

    As a result, the book has acquired a sort of unexpected intertextuality, whereby we can now see that what is said in the book is a pared-down and smoothed-over version of what was said in real time, now there for all to see in the pages of the Telegraph.

    The juxtaposition between the two can often be comic. For instance, on the unhappy day to which we all know this book is building – the disastrous day when Hancock’s affair is broken by The Sun – Hancock begins his entry with a knowing dissertation about love.

     

    What price love? I’ve always known from the novels that people will risk everything. They are ready to blow up their past, their present and their future. They will jeopardise everything they have worked for and everything that is solid and certain.

     

    The tone is of an earned, rueful wisdom, and we are invited to consider Hancock as a sort of modern Antony or Othello, undone by human failings, one who ‘loved not wisely, but too well’. Perhaps he is but he comes across differently to readers of The Telegraph in the following What’s App exchange on what was presumably the same day:

     

    Hancock: How bad are the pics?”

    Special adviser Damon Poole: It’s a snog and heavy petting.

    Hancock: “How the f— did anyone photograph that?”

    Gina Coladangelo: OMFG

    Hancock: “Crikey. Not sure there’s much news value in that and I can’t say it’s very enjoyable viewing.”

     

    It is The Telegraph version, sadly, which in all its awkwardness has the real flavour of lived experience. Incidentally, I find huge sadness and a sort painful dignity in Coladangelo’s acronym, and I suspect many readers will feel especially sorry for her.

    Perhaps in a ghoulish way it is good to have both versions, but there is an overriding sense that we know more than we’d like or ought to about the whole thing. Anyone who enjoys reading about the destruction of other people’s lives and imagines themselves immune from similar treatment has ceased to think themselves fallible on another day.

    Of course, the question of government by What’s App has now been taken up as a live issue in direct response to the Oakeshott leaks. It seems unlikely that it’s any worse as a form of government, to paraphrase Churchill, than all the others which have been tried. In fact, the real thing at issue has always been between responsible and irresponsible government.

    How does Hancock, and how does the political class, come off in Pandemic Diaries? It’s a mix. The book conveys Hancock’s Tiggerishness very well in the clip of its prose. Developments are often greeted with a one word exclamation. “Stark,” he writes on hearing news that the NHS could have a deficit of 150,000 beds and 9,000 ICU spaces. “Fuck,” he says, on hearing that Nadine Dorries has tested positive early on in the pandemic. “Amazing,” he exclaims when he hears that 4,000 nurses and 500 doctors have rejoined the NHS in 24 hours on 21st March. This turns out to be his favourite word and is levelled at good news on the vaccination programme and at the exploits of Captain Sir Tom Moore. Its obverse: “Very sobering” is deployed when the Covid deaths spike, as they do saddeningly throughout the book.

    The style conveys someone in a hurry, and one is left in no doubt that Hancock had the energy and ability for the job. In fact, he probably had every right to imagine he had a good chance of being prime minister one day. Although his official mentor is George Osborne, who crops up occasionally in the book, Hancock feels more reminiscent of Blair; in fact, he sometimes seems to have self-consciously modelled himself on him. Blair’s astonishing electoral success marked the younger Conservative generation who began to imagine that power would never come their way if they didn’t somehow emulate him.

    It was Clive James who said of Richard Nixon that he could handle the work; Hancock was the same. You can feel that the Health Department, unwieldy and daunting a brief as it is, was in some way too small for his ambition, and that he role wasn’t too much for him. He was equal to the task, and throughout you have a sense of him moving his agenda forward: he comes across as a skilled and astonishingly hard-working minister.

    Even so, I don’t think the book is likely to make people especially eager to enter politics. This might be because we all know that whatever is going on in the book, our hero is hurtling with alarming pace towards downfall and public humiliation.

    But this isn’t the only reason. In the first place, large sections of the book seem to detail something like a toxic work environment which few would wish to join. The undoubted villain of the book is a certain Dominic Cummings, which are the passages I most enjoyed reading, since he seems to get under Hancock’s skin very easily, leading to some entertaining and quite astute rants: perhaps we are never more insightful than when we hate. On March 31st 2020 we get the beginnings of a theme which will recur:

     

    Amid all this, Cummings’s morning meetings have turned into a shambles. I can’t say I’m shocked. The feedback is that no one really knows who’s meant to be talking about what, to whom, or indeed whether they’re supposed to be at that meeting or the one an hour later….Managing No. 10 is a massive and extremely frustrating part of my job.

     

    As much as one can sometimes feel a bit frustrated with Hancock himself, this rings true, and there is real relief in the book which you suspect must have been felt by all the characters in the book, including Boris Johnson, when Cummings leaves.

    Government itself seems ad hoc, and Boris himself very often reactive. Of course, this might be an effect of the genre: we only see Boris when Hancock goes to see him, and then as it’s all being told through Hancock’s eyes. But there seems to be a sort of fatal passivity about Boris, the ramifications of which played out in March 2023 before the Privileges Committee.

    Above all, we’re beginning to realise that these were just very unusual times. That is perhaps the biggest hindrance towards enjoying this book: the events it describes were both appalling and recent. What a terrible thing the virus was and is; how terrible lockdown was. There is no doubt for this reader that Hancock found a single-minded groove over lockdown which to some extent kept him sane and able to function under pressure. It was this coping mechanism which led to some of the worst What’s Apps in the Oakeshott leaks, including the infamous one where he considers threatening to block a local MP’s disability centre. By a certain point, he had come to believe in lockdown as, to use another infamous phrase, a ‘Hancock triumph.’

    The reader is left with the sense that perhaps Hancock went a little bit mad. But one feels that somewhere in his make-up is a man of admirable energy and commitment. He’s not quite in the Randolph Churchill, Joseph Chamberlain and Ken Clarke category of almost Prime Ministers, but a couple of rungs down, with Nick Clegg for company.

  • Book review: Ronel Lehmann on Lord Cruddas’s Passport to Success: From Milkman to Mayfair

    Ronel Lehmann

     

    I could not put the book down from the moment that I began reading, despite its author for a time crossing the road when he saw me approach. As an Honorary Trustee, I was fundraising for Noah’s Ark Children’s Hospice capital appeal and Peter was inundated with similar requests. He did contribute for which we will always be incredibly grateful. It set the scene for what was a remarkable journey From Milkman to Mayfair.

    Unlike many business leader autobiographies, this was not ghost written but penned by the great man himself. Whilst reading you can hear his tone of voice during an extraordinary voyage right to the top.

    The son of a meat market porter and an office cleaner, Peter left Shoreditch Comprehensive School at the age of fifteen with no qualifications and a part time job as a milkman. Today he’s Lord Cruddas of Shoreditch, the founder of a £1.5 billion financial trading company and a distinguished philanthropist, giving to over two hundred charities through his foundation which helps young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

    Fed up with Labours economic management, Peter began his foray into politics, becoming a key Conservative Party donor. But after being elevated to Treasurer in 2011, he fell victim to a Sunday Times sting which he was falsely accused of breaking the law on party donations. With unflinching honesty, he reveals the full story of his successful libel battle and opens of Pandora’s box of profound wider questions about newspaper dark arts and the power of the British press over the judicial system.

    Refusing to be scared off from the political world, Peter co-founded the winning Vote Leave campaign. Here, he gives a detailed insider view of the real reasons behind the victory and contemplates how Britain can now thrive outside the EU.

    Filled with heartbreak and elations, this is the extraordinary story of Peter’s epic rise from an east London council estate to a Mayfair mansion – and includes plenty of tips for budding billionaires, not to mention the importance of giving back.

    Honestly, I cannot wait for his sequel, and so will you.


    Passport to Success is published by Biteback Publishing at £20