Boris johnson

Boris Johnson claims that in his first year at Oxford he attended just one lecture. Delivered in the crepuscular gloom of the Pitt Rivers Museum, it was about Rapa Nui, the tiny Pacific island 2,200 miles from mainland Chile. As a boy, Johnson had read the Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl’s Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island and had become obsessed. No wonder. For although Rapa Nui – or Easter Island – is only half the size of the Isle of Wight, it has a haunting history teeming with questions. Who first discovered this speck in the Pacific? How did they get there? How did they manage to settle in this place battered by subtropical seas, rat-infested, with no permanent freshwater streams and whose only abundant resource was stone? Were they cannibals?

Why did the United Kingdom leave the European Union? Perhaps it might be better to ask why did it ever join. Tom McTague attempts to answer both questions in this panoramic history of British – and continental – politics from 1942 to the present day. It is to the author’s great credit that he approaches a debate which has polarised politics and shattered friendships with disciplined, but never anaemic, detachment. It is hard to think of many books which leave one admiring both Edward Heath and Enoch Powell more. McTague has set himself a formidable task in seeking to explain the two most consequential decisions of British postwar politics. That he does so not just with fair-mindedness but mastery of narrative sweep and fresh perspective makes this a significant achievement.

We think of PTSD as something that happens to war veterans, but the Conservative politician Theo Clarke’s harrowing account of birth trauma proves otherwise. Her perspective is unique. When the former MP for Stafford was in the last weeks of her pregnancy, the government was in shambles. Boris Johnson was about to resign, to be succeeded by Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak in embarrassingly short order; and Queen Elizabeth was on her deathbed. It was a stressful time for an MP to have a baby. We are acutely aware of this in the first half of Breaking the Taboo, which is part political memoir and part exposé of the UK’s birth trauma crisis. Clarke wrote a letter calling for a vote of no confidence in Johnson from hospital.

For many Spectator readers, their only exposure to the workings of the Whips’ Office will be through the machinations of Francis Urquhart, Michael Dobbs’s fictional chief whip made famous in House of Cards. In the first diaries published by a former chief whip, Simon Hart aims to shine a light on the vital and often unrecognised role that the Whips’ Office plays in the functioning of parliament and government. Having been overlooked by David Cameron and Theresa May, Hart arrives at the top table under Boris Johnson in 2019, nine years after his entry to parliament. He serves as secretary of state for Wales until he joinsa slew of others in resigning from the government – the prelude to Johnson’s resignation as prime minister.

The great parliamentary sketchwriter Quentin Letts, the Henry Lucy of our day, has described Sir Graham Brady (now Lord Brady) thus: ‘Were he a yacht, his galley would gleam, the decks would be scrubbed daily and there would be a large brass bell to summon matelots to morning parade. Commodore Brady runs a tight ship.’ After 27 years in the Commons, 14 of them as Chair of the 1922 Committee, the commodore has swapped his deck garb for ermine and written a kiss-and-tell about his political encounters with five Tory prime ministers. The 1922 Committee – the fabled men in grey suits who represent the parliamentary party’s backbenchers – is ‘the closest thing the Conservative party has to its own trade union’.