Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem

"Yeah. Fall Out is a brilliant book. In an odd way, it proves a lot of what I would usually describe as the rules of what not to do to write a brilliant political book wrong. It’s unashamedly a book about a very small elite. It’s not a study of the socio-economic causes of of Brexit, the political undercurrents that led to Brexit referendum and the snap election, 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 is a book built on incredible access. It must have been written up at a frightening speed in order to meet its deadline. Yet, despite all of those incredible pressures on it, it’s actually really good. From an access perspective, but it also reads well. Which, having read God knows how many submissions to the Baillie Gifford Prize, I have now realised is very much not a given. It’s technically a sequel, in that his first book All Out War was about the Brexit referendum. In keeping with all good sequels, it’s much darker and nastier, because almost everyone involved this time seems to have hated one another. Having covered it and spoken to many of those involved, Shipman’s access is peerless. But it’s also surreal. Although I wrote about it at the time, I hadn’t really absorbed how much more miserable and nasty they all were until reading a full book of it, where everyone swears and has a go and just engages in casual cruelty all the time. It is a really great insight into the collapse of Theresa May, essentially. Yes, I think we will. Partly because of how well it reads. Although, inevitably, it will only be seen as the first draft of history. It will be replaced by more weighty politics books that will have the benefit of access to documents, civil service files, ministerial diaries, and all of the rest of that. So its role will change. At the moment, it’s a very good secondary source, but I think it will live on as a very good primary source from someone who was right at the coalface of a lot of this stuff."

"On the train here, I was thinking about what makes a great history book–and a modern history book in particular—and I think there are three things: first is if it can take you behind the scenes and tell you what people were really thinking and saying to each other at the time. That by reading the book, we learn things that we otherwise might only get a hint of. The second important quality for a good modern history book is that it gives you the bigger picture. We get bombarded day after day with news, and it just becomes overwhelming if you’re trying to make sense of the history and really understand events. A good history book is one that takes you out of the hurly-burly of the day-to-day and shows you how things fit together. “Modern history is inevitably an exercise in nostalgia” Third and finally, I think modern history is inevitably an exercise in nostalgia. It reminds you of your own past. It pushes you to remember where you were and what you were thinking when something happened. The books I’ve chosen offer examples of all three of these aspects in different ways. Starting with the books by Tim Shipman, All Out War and Fallout : these are consummate insider accounts of the politics of the last few years. These are events we’re still living through, and the third book in the trilogy will be out later this year. Both are really substantive books that I give to my students. They’re very long and very detailed, not lightweight books by any means. He’s got this amazing capacity to marshal the minutiae of what’s going on, but also make his account rich in its personalities and its anecdotes. The level of access he’s been able to get is breathtaking. You get a sense of really being told what people were arguing and thinking and saying to each other. For me, it’s the level of insider access that makes these books stand apart and it’s what journalists like Shipman can give you. It is a page-turner. It’s quite interesting to see politicians being so deliciously and cleverly rude about each other and to each other. Clearly he’s dealing with massively important affairs of state, but the characters are just so human, the way they’re portrayed. I just find it beautiful to read. They’re big books—goodness knows how long the audiobook must be—but coming to the end, you can kid yourself that you’re actually an expert. The books really do lay out all of the options. It’s this wonderful mixture of the knife-in-the-back, day-to-day human politics without losing sight of the big picture of why this matters and why people care about it. The classic example is Bob Woodward in America. Watergate set him up for a career where he had a high degree of access to George W Bush. He wrote some really great insider accounts of the Iraq War and then, more recently, about Obama and now Trump. In Britain, for the Labour government you had Andrew Rawnsley. He was the chief political correspondent of the Observer and he wrote a book, Servants of the People (and also a second book, The End of the Party ) where he was trusted as an insider by all of the key people and was clearly living and breathing it on a day-to-day basis. That’s the other book that stands out. So it’s relatively unusual but not impossible, and Shipman is as good as any."