POLITICS
The Prime Ministers We
Never Had by Steve Richards
Atlantic £20
Political giants such as Roy
Jenkins, Denis Healey and
Michael Heseltine could all
have been prime minister, so
what stopped them? The
political commentator Steve
Richards suggests that some
simply didn’t want it enough,
and some were reforming
ministers who made too many
enemies. An easy read, with
insight into the qualities
needed to get to the very top.
The Impossible Office?
The History of the British
Prime Minister
by Anthony Seldon
Cambridge UP £19.99
The British politicians who
didn’t make it to No 10 might
have had a lucky escape.
Anthony Seldon offers a
depressing picture of life as
prime minister. “Remarkably
few achieve what they
hoped,” he says. “They are
criticised, mocked, and
undermined mercilessly.” He
says Walpole, William Pitt the
Younger, Peel, Palmerston,
Gladstone, Lloyd George,
Churchill, Attlee and Thatcher
made a real difference. The
failure of the rest, he suggests,
was usually self-inflicted.
What Does Jeremy Think?
Jeremy Heywood and the
Making of Modern Britain
by Suzanne Heywood
Wm Collins £25
A biography of a civil servant
is unusual enough, let alone
one written by his wife (they
met when he interviewed her
for a Treasury job). Heywood
served four prime ministers,
and headed the civil service
when he married Bridget, a
white Scottish woman, so he
is well placed to consider why
Muslims and non-Muslims get
so much wrong about each
other. He concludes that
many problems are not
religious but caused by class
and geography, “where
immigrants came from in the
subcontinent and where they
settled in this country”. cA world
of trouble
Covid, Brexit, antisemitism: the stakes
are high in Roland White’s 2021 picks
Jews Don’t
Count
by David
Baddiel
TLS Books
£9.99A passionate contribution
to the debate about why
antisemitism isn’t
considered to be racism
in some progressive
left-wing circles. The
author lists examples from
his personal experience,
including shocking chants
at a football match, and a
teacher hissing “Jew!”
when Baddiel, below,
arrived at a new school
aged 12. He wonders why
people are allowed to say
things about Jews that
would be career-
threatening when said
about other minorities. A
challenging and thought-
provoking read.OUR BOOK OF
THE YEAR
until shortly before lung
cancer killed him, aged 56, in- Partly an account of
Whitehall life, and partly a
love story.
The Gate to China
A New History of the People’s
Republic & Hong Kong
by Michael Sheridan
Wm Collins £25A history of Hong Kong so
detailed that it notes how the
headquarters of HSBC enjoys
good feng shui because
dragons can pass through its
atrium between the sea and
the mountains. Sheridan, a
long-serving Far East
correspondent of this
newspaper, explains why the
island is so important to
China, and what this tells us
about China’s world view.Chief of Staff
Notes from Downing Street
by Gavin Barwell
Atlantic £20Theresa May’s closest aide
gives his account of the Brexit
chaos on her watch. He is
impressed by the “Anglophile”
President Macron and
Chancellor Merkel, “a master
of the detail”, but is scathing
about Keir Starmer. What
went wrong? It would have
helped, he admits, if the prime
minister hadn’t made such a
mess of the 2017 election.Failures of State
The Inside Story of Britain’s
Battle with Coronavirus
by Jonathan Calvert and
George Arbuthnott
Mudlark £20In April last year this
newspaper published a
damning attack by our Insight
team on the government’s
approach to coronavirus,
“38 days when Britain
sleepwalked into disaster”. It
revealed how Boris Johnson
missed five Cobra meetings
and was late leading the
country into lockdown. This is
the book of the headline: the
first draft of the history of the
UK’s pandemic.They What Muslims and
Non-Muslims Get Wrong
About Each Other
by Sarfraz Manzoor
Wildfire £20The author and broadcaster
Sarfraz Manzoor faced
opposition from his familyAlso ran Michael Heseltine
never made prime ministerNICK ANSELL/ALAMYRace debate David Baddiel
on ‘progressive’ views SASKIA RUSHER/BBC
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