On the front cover of this useful, informative book by two Times journalists is a cartoon of Keir Starmer. This is, surely, a mistake: the book is far more about Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff and the architect of his remarkable general election victory last year.
Patrick Maguire is one of the best columnists of his generation and Gabriel Pogrund is a garlanded scoop-getter, so I mean no disrespect when I say they have chosen to “do a Tim Shipman”. This means, à la the Sunday Times journalist, they have painstakingly accumulated hundreds of hours of interviews with political advisers to produce as comprehensive a narrative as possible of Westminster doings. Shipman’s approving quotations appear twice, on the front and back of the book.
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