This has been a year of ghosts. At home, history returned to haunt British politics, with David Cameron recalled to government (why hello, ghost of Christmas past) and the Covid inquiry summoning Boris Johnson’s period of rule (more like ghosts of Christmas parties). Abroad, the threat of a Trump comeback hangs over the US, while in Israel and Gaza an age-old conflict has been tragically revived.
It’s a fitting year, then, for writers using history to make sense of the present and none do so more movingly than the journalist and Conservative peer Danny Finkelstein in Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad (William Collins), an immigrant family’s story of love and war, but above all, a passionate defence of moderate liberal values as a bulwark against violent extremes. His mother was a German Jew who miraculously survived a Nazi concentration camp; his father a Jew from Lvov in Poland (now Lviv in Ukraine), shipped off by the invading Russians to one of Stalin’s gulags. The deliberately ordinary suburban life they eventually forged in Britain, after meeting and marrying, was an extraordinary victory over the odds, a reminder never to make assumptions about what lies behind unassuming front doors or underestimate the privilege of a quiet life. The three children of this marriage were understandably raised to believe in the importance of politics, which had meant literally life and death to their parents, but also to stand “for moderation against extremism. For reason over irrationality. For optimism and resilience, tempered by the memory of dictatorship and oppression but never overwhelmed by it,” Finkelstein writes.
They are values the former Tory minister-turned-podcaster Rory Stewart doubtless shares, but in Politics on the Edge (Jonathan Cape) he offers a more disillusioned if equally beautifully written take on putting them into practice, reflecting with “a sense of shame” on a frustrating Westminster career. Defiantly burning bridges as he goes – Michael Gove, George Osborne, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss all come off memorably badly – Stewart lists everything he thinks ails conventional politics: over-mighty party members, the prizing of simplicity over complexity, the way ministers are never in a job long enough to master either the brief or their civil servants.
The Foreign Office deems him naive, and arguably has a point: Stewart comes across as an incurable 19th-century romantic, adrift in a world of soundbites and grubby compromises. Yet when he describes his time as a reforming prisons minister, under the thoughtful David Gauke, you glimpse how transformative government could be - at least until Stewart blows up his career for one last doomed stand against hard Brexit. (For the bigger picture on how that battle has shaped modern Britain, the Telegraph journalist Ben Riley-Smith’s The Right to Rule (John Murray) – a majestic digested read of the last 13 years of Tory leadership, drawing together the threads of four premierships each defined by Brexit – will keep any politics junkie busy through Boxing Day).
Heading into a general election year with change in the air, there are still surprisingly few authors looking ahead to a potential Labour future, pending the former journalist Tom Baldwin’s hotly anticipated biography of Keir Starmer in February.
But there are three early contenders for shadow cabinet bedside tables. The first is Sadiq Khan’s Breathe (Cornerstone), in which London’s mayor draws lessons learned from a sometimes controversial crusade against air pollution for climate policy more broadly. It’s surprisingly funny, endearingly human, and honest about the pitfalls without making things sound hopeless.
The second is former Labour minister Denis MacShane’s Labour Takes Power (Biteback). This diary of the first Blair parliament is very much of its rather boozy, blokey time, and the author (for much of this time a junior Foreign Office bag-carrier) rarely underestimates his own importance. But it’s an essential reminder of just how difficult governing is, even after a landslide: within months Blair had suffered a scandal over tobacco sponsorship, a backbench rebellion over benefit cuts, and an early foreign policy dilemma over Iraq, while by the end of the parliament MacShane notes rising tensions over eastern European immigration and what would prove a fatal reluctance to make the pro‑European case.
Wes Streeting’s memoir One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up (Hodder & Stoughton) meanwhile rattles cheerfully through the extraordinary life story of the shadow health secretary, growing up in poverty in the East End as the grandson of a convicted bank robber – though it offers only rather guarded clues into his thinking as an adult.
My favourite Labour book of the year, however, was the documentary-maker Linda McDougall’s Marcia Williams: The Life and Times of Baroness Falkender (Biteback), a long-overdue revisiting of Harold Wilson’s all-powerful political secretary and “office wife”. (Widely thought to have been lovers in the 1950s, by the time Wilson became prime minister in 1964, McDougall argues, the pair had settled into a formidable political partnership.) The extraordinary story of how Williams carved an unprecedented role for herself inside a male-dominated world, while managing secretly to have two children by a married Daily Mail journalist and conceal the pregnancies from her colleagues, is one begging to be told by another woman, and McDougall brings nuance to it.
She doesn’t deny Williams could be bullying, melodramatic and difficult. But she asks the right questions about why a single mother in a highly pressured job, terrified of her secret emerging and reliant on a cocktail of amphetamines and Valium to get through the day, might seem emotionally volatile. A terrific read for anyone interested in how working women’s lives have changed since the 1970s, in or out of politics.
Talking of which, it’s been a bumper year for books by or about female prime ministers. Harry Cole and James Heale’s Out of the Blue (HarperCollins) is an irresistibly juicy account of Liz Truss’s rapid rise and even more rapid downfall, doubling as a record of just how bad things got should anyone seek to rewrite history at the next Tory leadership contest. See also John Crace’s Depraved New World (Guardian Faber), a collection of sketches of the last year of madness without which no Christmas stocking is complete.
Theresa May’s The Abuse of Power (Headline), meanwhile, isn’t a conventional memoir but a serious-minded study of scandals in which vulnerable people were failed by those in authority, from the Grenfell fire to Hillsborough to the Rotherham grooming gangs. Though she gives herself too easy a ride over the Windrush catastrophe, it’s an unusual look at power in its broadest sense aimed squarely at other women incensed by people not doing their jobs properly.
I suspect May would approve of Cassidy Hutchinson, the 25-year-old White House aide who helped expose Donald Trump’s role in whipping up a post-election mob to storm Capitol Hill. Raised a staunch Republican, in her book Enough (Simon & Schuster), Hutchinson describes the dawning horror of realising what she’s enabling by working for Trump, and her eventual decision that it’s her democratic duty to testify against him. The brilliance is in the sleazy details: Trump refusing to wear a Covid mask because it smudged his makeup, or the chief of staff’s wife complaining that his suits smelled of smoke from all the documents burned in the administration’s last days.
To read Hutchinson’s descriptions of being stopped in the street by well-wishers, convinced her testimony had helped save America from something dangerous, is to feel faintly embarrassed that we’re not more protective of Britain’s own fragile democracy. Now there’s a New Year’s resolution.
• To browse all politics books included in the Guardian and Observer’s best books of 2023 visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
