Jerry Hayes

When Dan Hannan's book, A Doomed Marriage: Britain and Europe, arrived through the post I was alarmed to see that it was shrink wrapped in the same way as top shelf pornographic material. For those of you Europhiles who rather warm to the idea of a federal Europe and look forward to the day when we join the Single Currency, this will not be a happy read. But if you are of the Amish wing of the Conservative Party (or even a Kipper), convinced that it won't be too long before the clank of jackboots will be heard on the Mall and that her Majesty will be evicted from Buckingham Palace and replaced by a fat sweating Belgian, then this is not just a book of biblical importance, it will be a masturbatory aid.

Edwina Currie is very much an acquired taste and I am very happy that I acquired it in 1983 when we were both first elected to Parliament. Sassy, saucy, fiendishly bright, burning with drive and ambition, yet with a heart, she was head and shoulders above most of her male contemporaries and they hated her for it. People forget just how far Cameron has detoxified the Conservative party. Women, gays (only tolerated in the research department), blacks and Asians had a very steep if not impossible mountain to climb just to get on the candidates list, let alone have a chance of obtaining a winnable seat. Currie tells one tale that should shock any reader to the core: ‘Worse was the appalling story told by Geeta Sidhu, a wealthy and beautiful Indian recently selected for Blackburn...

I first knew Jeremy Vine as a very young, charming, earnest and totally driven political correspondent for the BBC in the 1980s. So when I started reading It's All News to Me, I was dreading a rather worthy read. I was delightfully disappointed. This is a wonderful bitchfest of not quite malicious gossip and the power struggles at the BBC. In politics it is dog eat dog. At the beeb it is the other way round. Any aspiring broadcaster should use this book as a survival manual. There are some wonderful quotes. From former political editor Robin Oakley: ‘The people at the top of the BBC don't have very much power, so when they act, it tends to be very violent.’ The legendary John Sergeant has some crackers.

One of the great tragedies of political history is that the foresight, clarity and prescience of Enoch Powell are too often viewed though the murky prism of his notorious Rivers of Blood speech. His kindness, courtesy, love of his family, nation and the House of Commons can be so easily overlooked. And his dry and sometimes mischievous sense of humour almost ignored.  Enoch at 100 is a wonderful and accessible book which gives us a fair and accurate perspective of the man that so many of us genuinely liked and respected. It is a compilation of personal anecdotes by those who knew him well and others who give real insight into a man whose scarily logical mind was well ahead of its time. The anecdotes, particularly, by his wife Pamela, are both moving and revealing.

Francis Elliott and James Hanning's latest update on all things Cameron, Cameron: Practically a Conservative, is a masterclass of painstaking research, balance and a great store of anecdotage. Is he the slick PR man with more U-turns than a military lavatory block? Is he a ruthless and arrogant privileged bully? Or is he unimaginative and rather pedestrian in thought and deed? Or is he a prisoner of a hunting, shooting and country house upbringing? If you want to get the beginnings of how to understand what makes Cameron tick, you should read this book. Even if you would prefer that his political corpse was found mangled under a number 11 bus (or perhaps the Clapham omnishambles); read it.

Let me nail my colours clearly to the mast: I would prefer to eat my own spleen, or listen to a Gordon Brown speech, than read the memoirs of a barrister/politician. The remaindered lists are groaning under these unsellable, unreadable, dusty monuments to over-inflated egos. They should be pulped and moulded into bed pans.  However, Ivan Lawrence’s splendid book, My Life of Crime — out in paperback later this month — is very much the exception. Ivan, a distinguished QC and formerly a high-profile MP, lives life to the full and this book is brimful of classy anecdotes and well worth the read. Ivan and I have been friends for nearly 30 years, and this book tells me things about him I never knew.

I have been awaiting a definitive biography of Nick Clegg for a while. And while I’m not entirely sure whether Chris Bowers’ Nick Clegg, The Biography quite gets there, don’t let me discourage you. This is an excellent book and a fascinating insight into the man. The trouble is that most of us who enjoy reading about our leaders have been used to being thrown great hunks of red meat scandal, vile gossip and an undertone that the subject is far more of a shit than we had dared imagine. We then toddle off to bed, sleeping soundly in the reassurance that our hero has feet of clay like the rest of us. If this book is to be believed (and to be fair, it is painstakingly researched), Clegg has no redeeming defects.