Nick Thomas-Symonds is a Labour MP and shadow minister, so you might expect his Harold Wilson: The Winner, a biography of the two-time Labour prime minister, to be a hagiography. Not so. Even though the argument of the book is well summarised by its subtitle, this is still a thorough—and thoroughly readable—account of a political titan whose stature needs restoring.
Let’s resist the temptation to describe Nigel Farage, by contrast, as a loser. He has certainly never had the ballot-box popularity of Wilson, but, as Michael Crick’s One Party After Another makes clear, he has triumphed in other ways—as an extrinsic, pinstriped influence on mainstream politics in the 21st century. If you want to understand the extent of that influence, and have some fun along the way, Crick’s is the book to read.
The insiders to Farage the outsider are sharply described in Simon Kuper’s Chums. This is mostly the story of a small group of people (Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Dan Hannan et al) in a pretty small place (Oxford University in the 1980s) that provided the ideological soup from which they would emerge into politics. But there is a much bigger point here—about the persistent failures of social mobility in the UK.
Oliver Bullough’s Butler to the World shows where the chums and others have led us: to an underpowered, rather than superpowered, UK that’s subservient to “tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals”. What elevates this book, aside from its artful turns of phrase, is the depth of its reporting. This isn’t just about Russian oligarchs in London—though they certainly feature—but legal, financial and cultural changes stretching back to the 1950s.
A saddening contrast is provided by Peter Apps’s Show Me the Bodies, the result of five years of investigation into the Grenfell fire that caused 72 deaths. It is a work born of rage at what Apps calls “the most serious crime committed on British soil this century”. In the end, it is the book’s forensic calm that stands out.
There is a similarly impressive balance between empathy and investigation in Polly Curtis’s Behind Closed Doors, which exposes how the UK care system often fails to provide just that—care—to those who need it. Curtis doesn’t only highlight the problem—of thousands of families being broken up due to institutional fears and failings—but also proposes solutions that are persuasive and practicable.
In My Fourth Time, We Drowned, the journalist Sally Hayden explicitly takes a different approach, by choosing simply to report on the horrors of Libya’s migrant detention facilities. And they really are horrors. Thanks to cash transfers from EU countries, Libya is locking up thousands of Europe-bound migrants in conditions that Hayden has courageously found the words to describe. Rape is endemic, as are illness, malnutrition, torture and, of course, death.
There is horror, too, in a pair of books about the Chinese government’s methods of control. Josh Chin and Liza Lin’s Surveillance State is a well-sourced account of how the party has inveigled its way into all parts of civil society. How I Survived a Chinese “Re-education” Camp, by Gulbahar Haitiwaji with Rozenn Morgat, gives the human side of that merciless process.
Two geopolitical tomes have stood up to the state of the world in 2022. The first is Lawrence Freedman’s Command, in which the legendary professor of warfare explains the politics of modern conflict—all the way to Ukraine. The second is Henry Kissinger’s Leadership, an analysis of statecraft filtered through six of its practitioners, from Adenauer to Thatcher.
Or if you’d prefer to avoid geopolitics, there’s always the beautiful game, with its state-backed clubs, corrupt institutions, controversial tournaments and… oh. Rory Smith’s Expected Goals is about the rise of big data in football, in everything from the coaching of players to the running of gambling markets. Somewhere far away there’s someone pressing a computer key every time Harry Kane heads a ball.
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Books of the Year 2022: Ideas
Books of the Year 2022: Lives
Books of the Year 2022: History
