As a political journalist and jury member for this year’s bailie gifford award, you’re in a good position to tell us: has 2018 been a good year for political books?
The learning curve for me as a judge for that award was realizing how high the quality of nonfiction was in general, compared to political nonfiction. I think this is because in political nonfiction there’s often a guaranteed market, if you can get it out fast near a big news event, so somehow political nonfiction didn’t come off that well.
You are reading: Best political books 2018
but despite a hangover that tends to come after an election (and tends to be improvised), there’s also lots and lots of brilliant stuff, including political books that have managed to be brilliant despite having been changed to fit to a timeline or political event.
what makes a good political book? Is it access, timeliness, or insight?
the essence of a good political reading is that it is informed, which, I suppose, can be driven by access; in other cases hours of research in a file; insightful, something that really changes the way we perceive an event or a politician or a policy. obviously, it also has to be well written.
one of the problems is that, from a results perspective, a book about, say, work in 2017 has to come out before the end of 2017, or early 2018 at the latest. but often insight has to be sacrificed to do that, or prose. while there are people who manage to juggle those questions, there are also many who don’t.
Well, let’s discuss the books you’d like to recommend. Maybe we could start with David Runciman’s How Democracy Ends. I have seen this described as “connecting the dots between the financial crisis, populism, brexit and trump”. Is it a very pessimistic book?
not. Actually, despite its theme, Runciman isn’t entirely pessimistic about the future. although I must admit that I ended the book feeling rather pessimistic about the future. takes as its theme the question that has become incredibly timely politically: with the rise of populist and anti-democratic leaders around the world, are we entering the last days of liberal democracy? trump is of course the most famous, but by no means the only one or the first.
what runciman does really cleverly is that it takes trump’s inauguration as its starting point, but it doesn’t feel like a ripped-from-the-headlines response to trump. he uses the inauguration as a way of democratic failures in greece in the 1970s, democratic failures throughout history, democratic failures in the global south. and then essentially asks: what does democratic failure look like in the 21st century?
We think we have a clear idea of what the end of a democracy looks like: it’s where the generals supplant the politicians. that is a very clear sense of whether democracy is over or not. but if you have a situation where there are still elections, but only party members can vote, has democracy ended? If you have elections, but one party controls the media and can bribe lots and lots of voters, is democracy over? How is the democratic failure today?
He does all of this and sets up this incredibly interesting set of overarching questions in what I think is also a wonderfully warm prose style. It was a really fantastic read, although at times it made me feel like I was, in fact, covering the last days of democracy.
writes: “Western democracy is over the hill. his cousin has passed. did you leave this book feeling that was the case?
yes. his gist is: if you think about democracy as we know it in its modern form, you are effectively at the age where you would expect him to go through a mid-life crisis. Now, some people recover from their midlife crises and go on to live happy, fulfilling lives for the second half of their lives. other people buy fancy sports cars and drive them off a cliff. poses these possible futures very well.
It’s not as doom-laden as you’d expect, though it’s still pretty doom-laden. especially since it doesn’t look like we’re going to have political leadership capable of making the right decisions to avoid being one of the people whose midlife crisis sends them crashing off a cliff.
Let’s talk about your second choice: Punch and Judy Politics: An Expert’s Guide to the Prime Minister’s Questions.
punch and judy’s politics is a really brilliant and interesting take on a bit of politics that I think most people in britain immediately recognise: prime ministerial question time, or pmqs. It was written by Ayesha Hazarika and Tom Hamilton, who have mentored and trained a number of union leaders for PMQs. it is based not only on his own experiences, but also on interviews with almost everyone who has been involved in doing it or preparing someone else to do it, both from the perspective of being in government and in opposition.
It’s also a story of how pmqs originally developed, from something to help william gladstone, then in his 80s, get through the day, so he could know what questions would come up at the same time. originally, anyone in parliament could rise at any time. from there, it became the much more stylized and formal session that we know today.
“to be honest i used to think of pmq as a huge and totally depressing waste of time”
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This political book really surprised me. Frankly speaking, when I first read it, I did so because I knew Tom and Ayesha and they asked me to. I expected to have to be polite about it. but i really loved it. It really changed my thinking about pmqs, which, to be honest, I used to think was a massive and totally depressing waste of time. I mean, it’s often both. but it really changed the way I think about its value and what it reveals about the two people involved in it at any given moment.
It really sheds light not only on the famous half hour of politics, but also on why political parties make the decisions they do, political strategy in general. i think about it not just every week when pmqs is on, i think about it almost every time when i write about why political parties do and say the things they do and say. if you want to read a book to really understand how political parties work and plan, it would be punch and judy politics.
interesting. pmqs, to my uninformed eye, just seems like an opportunity to brag and be subservient.
the problem with pmqs is the incentive for people to stand up and congratulate the prime minister on the wonderful job she is doing, the “let’s throw the prepared sound bites” kind of routine. but what you realize throughout this book is that pmqs has two really important functions.
first is that it is the device by which the rest of the government is accountable to downing street and the prime minister, because the prime minister is the person who will have to stand up for half an hour and answer questions about anything. so it actually has a very important role to play in terms of whitehall responsibility, as well as the responsibility of the prime ministers themselves.
Obviously, it is not, and I don’t think it ever will be, a body for proper accountability in the way that select committee hearings can be. but it is a really useful way for political parties to find weaknesses and holes in their own strategy. If you can’t answer or ask a question on the nhs because your health spokesperson has said something controversial, well, that’s going to be a problem in the election too.
so it’s a clever way for political parties to figure that out, and a really helpful way for all of us who cover it to get a sense of where they’re weak and where they’re strong, and what their strategies are. to avoid weak points will be. Of course, you can try to find out those things by asking people. but sometimes the things that people who work in politics say they will do and the things they actually do are quite divergent. therefore, the approach they take in pmqs is usually a pretty useful yardstick to measure it.
i remember the pressure jeremy corbyn was under during his first pmq. It was seen as the first test of his mettle as leader of the opposition.
I’m not sure which job I’d like to have less of in that interaction. the prime minister obviously has the weight of the government behind him, but ultimately it is he who answers the questions. but then, they’re also the last to arrive, so they’re guaranteed to have the last word.
the other side has a much smaller staff, no whitehall machine behind it, although they can theoretically set some of the terms. and although it doesn’t really matter in terms of the pattern of politics outside of westminster, it is very important within that world because it is very important for the morale of parliamentarians and helps them feel that they are being led well and so on. activated.
absolutely. let’s move on to the perils of perception: why we get almost everything wrong. this is not a title I am familiar with. Could you tell me about this political book?
The Perils of Perception is a new book by Bobby Duffy, formerly a pollster and now Director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London. it’s about the things we misperceive and how that changes the way we see the world: our political decisions. what duffy does so well in the book is that he lays out some pretty dense numerical and psychological issues in a lucid way that is accessible to just about anyone. He also does a very good job of dispelling the post-Trump (or post-Brexit) idea that people have misconceptions about the state of the world as a phenomenon that started in June 2016, fueled by Facebook. it’s really about the ways we are programmed to operate as human beings.
is a combination of his two disciplines: his long career as a pollster, his training as a psychology student. it’s just a fascinating insight into how we all think, including some really brilliant things about the things we all get wrong. So when you ask people to guess how many people in the population are over 65, we always think the number is more than it really is. if you ask them how many teen pregnancies there are, we always think it’s more than it is. Of course, some of that is press-driven, but it’s not like there’s some grand press conspiracy to tell us that there are more people over 65 than there are.
Even though it’s not a controversial book, I think in a weird way it makes you feel a little more optimistic. a lot of the books that came out in the immediate aftermath of trump’s election and brexit, most of which weren’t very good, wanted to establish this idea that people have been fooled by technology or apps or whatever. that makes you feel quite depressed and worried. while he’s not saying these things aren’t factors, what he does raise is the notion that these aren’t new problems, which, in a weird way, makes you feel like we could get through them again.
This discussion of bias reminds me of one of your recent tweets: You said you had been asked for a political opinion poll and felt that a particular bias affected your own responses.
yes, populus, a British pollster, called me and it was a really surreal experience. Obviously, I’ve written and read a lot about one of the things that’s really maddening to pollsters: social desirability bias. Social desirability bias is when instead of giving the truthful answer, you answer a question with what you think is the correct answer. and you want them to give you a truthful answer, not what they think is the correct answer.
basically they asked: “what are your perceptions of the royal air force?” the questions were incredibly fair and unbiased. they weren’t trying to get me to give a specific answer. I could tell they didn’t want me to say, ‘oh no, I associate the Royal Air Force with service and strong values,’ but I couldn’t. the question that really tripped me up was: ‘would you say you are proud of the British air force?’ I thought, ‘is there an option for neither proud nor prideless?’ It was really one of those weird things. it was surreal to have that experience of social desirability bias directly.
my background is in experimental psychology; I remember how much effort it takes to design questionnaires without leading questions. but to the participants, the wording, the unbiased wording that we finally settled on, might seem strange, even puzzling.
yes.
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you mentioned brexit: maybe we could talk about the consequences of tim shipman: a year of political chaos?
yes. fall out is a brilliant book. in a weird way, it tests a lot of what I’d normally describe as the rules of what not to do to write a brilliant political book badly.
shamelessly is a book about a very small elite. it is not a study of the socio-economic causes of brexit, the political undercurrents that led to the brexit referendum and snap elections, or based on social trends or what people in nuneaton felt about things. it is based on the machinations of about 40 people. and it’s a book based on incredible access. it must have been written at terrifying speed to meet its deadline.
However, despite all these incredible pressures on him, he’s actually really good. from an access perspective, but it also reads well. which, having read god knows how many bailie gifford award submissions, i now realize is not a fact. it’s technically a sequel, in the sense that the first book of his all out war was about the brexit referendum. according to all good sequels, it’s much darker and nastier, because almost everyone involved this time seems to have hated each other.
Having covered it and spoken to many of those involved, the sailor’s access is unparalleled. but it is also surreal. although I wrote about it at the time, it hadn’t really sunk in how much more miserable and disgusting everyone was until I read a whole book, where everyone swears and tries and just engages in casual cruelty all the time. It’s a great perspective on Theresa May’s collapse, essentially.
Will we still be reading this political book in a decade?
yes, I think we will. partly because of how well it reads. although, inevitably, it will only be seen as the first draft of the story. it will be replaced by heavier policy books that will have the benefit of accessing documents, civil service archives, ministerial diaries and everything else. so your role will change. At the moment it’s a very good secondary source, but I think it will continue to be a very good primary source from someone who was right at the origin of a lot of this stuff.
Finally, let’s move on to a more international title, Serhii Plokhy’s Chernobyl. The winner of the 2018 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction was recently announced. It has been one of the most critically acclaimed titles of the year. why?
It’s a brilliant book. Unsurprisingly, it’s about Chernobyl and the disaster that occurred there in the late 1980s. The story of that reactor’s construction, decline, and near collapse. it is very well written and has benefited greatly from its access to declassified Soviet archives.
It’s a really exciting book, as well as being a very interesting story from that time. But the reason I think it’s also a brilliant political book is fundamentally what Plokhy reveals in his writings: that the failure of Chernobyl was fundamentally a failure of a political system, as well as a failure of a scientific system. because you have people incentivized to exaggerate production goals, to meet deadlines that they shouldn’t have to meet. . .
“what plokhy reveals is that the failure of chernobyl was fundamentally a failure of a political system”
Now of course these are all system failures that freely exist within capitalism. I’m not saying that only a communist state could have a nuclear disaster, nothing like that. but it’s clearly a Soviet-era disaster. although a disaster like chernobyl could have happened under capitalism, the chernobyl disaster itself is very different from the soviet union, that kind of climate of secrecy and command and control. it really is just a brilliant vision of political and terrifying failure.
You realize we think of it as a massive reactor failure, but in reality, only about a quarter of the reactor failed. if the reactor completely collapsed, it would have ended life on this earth. it was a truly terrifying scenario, and he brings it to life. you don’t need to know anything about nuclear power or the period to follow it.
do you have this sense of how the political landscape in ukraine (and the former soviet union in general) has developed since chernobyl in this book?
no, although he nods in the prologue and epilogue, which I think is the appropriate place for a history book, “this is how it relates to today”.
what really works well is that you don’t feel the obligation to say, ‘this is how this relates to the present’. It does the same as it does with Europe! campaign, does it very well: none of them say, ‘look, this is how this matters today’.
It’s just reading it that you inevitably think, ‘hmm, well, there are plenty of rogue states with a history of secrecy and a ‘success at all costs’ attitude that have nuclear reactors. there are a lot of capitalist economies where people have to work ridiculous hours and achieve ridiculous goals with nuclear reactors.’ and as you read the book it’s impossible not to draw the obvious parallel.
If someone had to read only one book on your list, which would you choose?
It would have to be Chernobyl. I must have read it four times during the evaluation process and always got something new from it.
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