There's Nothing For You Here

"Fiona’s a Brit from the North East. She went to Harvard after her undergraduate degree and has stayed in the States ever since, ending up working in Trump’s White House. She became famous because she gave evidence to the impeachment hearings in Congress. On the back of that, she has written a book which is part analysis, part autobiography. It is very, very different to the other books here in the sense that it is autobiographical. “Very few people changed their minds” It does several things. She makes some interesting points about her time with the Trump White House, about social mobility and the difficulty she faced as a working-class girl from the North East when it came to navigating university admissions and things like that and the outright snobbery that she faced. She also makes this rather unexpected comparison between Russia, the US and the UK, and how, in their own different ways, they’re wrestling with very serious problems to do with de-industrialization and how you cope with that. I don’t think I would commend the book for the solutions it offers, but more for its first-person perspective. It’s a very personal exploration of some of the issues that the other books address. Yes, precisely. She’s talking about the places where Brexit support came from, which is to say smaller towns, particularly the smaller economically badly performing towns. Places like Bishop Auckland, where she grew up, fit into that quite neatly. It’s partly social history. It’s partly personal history. But it’s a nice book. It’s a good read. She’s had a fascinating life."