A series of rival accounts of the 20-day political whirlwind that swept the UK out of the European Union, destroyed David Cameron’s premiership and catapulted Theresa May into Downing Street are to be released during the party conference season.
The autumn “battle of the books” will see politicians and journalists compete for the best and most lurid revelations about a period in which dramatic news came so fast that participants and onlookers were unable to keep up. Iain Dale, whose company Biteback is publishing several Brexit books, said: “Events between referendum day and Theresa May standing outside No 10 moved so fast it was impossible to take it all in. The blitz of books should help fill in some of what we missed, including all the details of the political bitterness and bloodletting during the most tumultuous political summer since world war two.”
A foretaste will come with the publication on Friday of Andrew Gimson’s updated biography of Boris Johnson, the title of which has been changed from The Rise of Boris Johnson to The Adventures of Boris Johnson, with a new 50-page introduction about the events running up to the referendum to Johnson’s unexpected appointment as May’s foreign secretary.
“Before, but even more so after the Brexit vote, everyone at parties, wherever one went, was talking about Boris,” Gimson said. “I never had more interest from people both abroad and at home for information about him. There had always been scorn for Boris but when we voted to leave there was actual hatred. Then when everyone thought he was finished he came back as foreign secretary. The battle for the leadership unleashed dark passions and unspeakable vanities.”
Gimson’s new account is vitriolic about the role of Michael Gove who, having said he would back Johnson for PM, then turned against him. Delving into the detail of the extraordinary morning when Gove revealed he would run, Gimson says the then justice secretary never even rang Johnson to tell him he was deserting him.
Gove’s team maintained he tried but could not get through. “This, however, was a call that was never made,” writes Gimson. “Time was short, and it would have been an awkward conversation, but that was because what Gove was doing was such a betrayal. Only five days before, he had promised Boris his support. For Gove to claim that in those five days he had discovered Boris’s unfitness to be prime minister is an insult to our intelligence. He had known for many years of Boris’s strengths and weaknesses.”
“What really warped his judgment was his vanity: the irresistible belief that he would be better than Boris at being prime minister. Gove’s numerous denials of his fitness for the prime ministership were so many attempts to keep that raging vanity chained.”
In the middle of this month, former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg will publish his account of life in the coalition, Politics: Between the Extremes, which will surely include hard-hitting criticism of Cameron for the way he ran the Remain campaign and failed to make the case for staying in the EU.
Sir Craig Oliver, Cameron’s former director of communications, who was at the heart of the Remain team and is no admirer of either Gove or Johnson, will release his Brexit account soon. There will be other books from Tim Shipman of the Sunday Times, Owen Bennett of the Huffington Post, and journalist and Cameron’s second cousin Harry Mount, who will focus on the three weeks from 23 June until May’s arrival in No 10.
In mid to late October, arguably the most eagerly awaited of all will arrive on the bookshelves – a memoir from ardently pro-EU former chancellor and home secretary Kenneth Clarke about his 40 years at Westminster. Clarke rarely says anything uninteresting or predictable and he is unlikely to break that habit in print. His publisher, Pan MacMillan, is keeping silent about the book, Kind of Blue, knowing it is good.
Several weeks of Brexit revelations will brighten the conference season for sure, even if it is not quite in the way its new leader, the very disciplined May, would have liked.
