The year’s most disappointing Christmas gift for thousands of relatives has landed: Matt Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries.
Despite the former health secretary and marsupial-anus-chomper not having kept a diary (the whole thing was devised afterwards), Hancock was in the running to pocket £100,000 for what this paper said goes down “like a plate of sheep’s unmentionables”, and what the Telegraph has judged “Partridge-esque”.
So, in the spirit of goodwill, here are a few alternative UK political diaries that are more worthy of your time.
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Diaries, Volumes 1-8 by Alastair Campbell
Unlike Hancock, former Labour director of communications Alastair Campbell did actually keep contemporaneous journals during his time in the thick of politics. From the 1997 breaking of a new dawn with a sweeping Labour majority, to the Iraq war, to the interminable Tony Blair-Gordon Brown transition haggling, Campbell is an insightful narrator.
There’s also a strong emotional and personal component. Campbell writes honestly about his struggles with addiction and depression, and the strain Westminster put on his family life. There’s even an early impression of Keir Starmer during a 2015 dinner: “Maybe a bit too lawyerly, not instinct-driven, but smart and sorted.”
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The Castle Diaries by Barbara Castle
First elected in 1945, the close ally of Harold Wilson and adversary of Jim Callaghan became one of the most prominent, influential and longest-serving of Labour MPs (standing down from her Blackburn seat in 1979, though she was elected to the European parliament the same year). Castle published two volumes of diaries in the early 80s, spanning 1964-1976.
They detail her unceremonious booting from the cabinet by Callaghan, her love for Michael Foot, and her contradictory feelings on the notorious (and abandoned) In Place of Strife white paper, which left her adrift from her leftwing comrades. They also expose a more vulnerable side to the woman known as the Red Queen – a vulnerability not often apparent given her determination and rather obstinate reputation.
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The Diaries, Volume 1: 1918-1938 – Henry ‘Chips’ Channon
An initial – heavily redacted – version of former Southend MP Channon’s journals was published in 1967 (Nancy Mitford called them “vile and spiteful and silly”). The latest incarnation, edited by the journalist and broadcaster Simon Heffer, is far racier and more gossipy than the original.
Channon, the Chicago-born son of a shipping magnate who was elevated to British high society via his marriage to a Guinness heiress, was no great shakes as a politician – he got as far as parliamentary private secretary to Rab Butler – but he was an indefatigable socialiser, bisexual seducer (he often shared a bed with his brother-in-law), skilled raconteur and shameless name-dropper.
The Queen Mother is “a fundamentally treacherous character” and Winston Churchill “looks like an angry Buddha”. Amid the undeniably entertaining flourishes there is a much darker side, however - including flagrant antisemitism and support for appeasement in the run up to the second world war.
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Diaries: In Power by Alan Clark
There’s not too much to be said about Alan Clark’s diaries that hasn’t already been said; they are a classic of political observational writing (and once described by the BBC as “part Brideshead Revisited, part Adrian Mole”). Three volumes cover the last three decades of the 20th century – including an acerbic telling of the downfall of Margaret Thatcher’s government, in which he served.
Clark doesn’t always come off brilliantly – especially in regard to his attitudes to women (he describes his future wife as “a perfect victim”) and he held views that I’m going to describe as Channon-adjacent.
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Diary of an MP’s Wife by Sasha Swire
Forget most of the diaries and memoirs by the players themselves, this thrillingly entertaining 2020 book by a former journalist and wife of past Tory minister Hugo Swire is the pick of the bunch when it comes to documenting the past 10 years of calamitous Conservative rule. As my colleague Gaby Hinsliff put it in her enthusiastic review, Swire “spills the guts of four governments” (including “too much information on David Cameron’s colonoscopy”).
Swire has the same talent for indiscretion and waspishness that Channon did. Dominic Cummings looks like an “odd amoeba you find in jars in school science labs”; Gavin Williamson is dismissed as having all the sophistication and intellect of a seven-year-old.
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Edwina Currie Diaries, 1987-1992 by Edwina Currie
These are not a great of the genre, but are worth a note for the inclusion of a bombshell: former Tory MP Currie’s admission of a four-year affair with John Major (the former prime minister who was then a government whip). In the present era of 24-hour news and incessant tweeted Westminster intrigue it’s rare for memoirs to drop something as big – although rumours had swirled for a long time, and you might say that Currie’s 1994 novel A Parliamentary Affair was a rather big hint.
Nevertheless, the 2002 publication of Currie’s book caused a sensation, resulting in a public statement of contrition from Major, in which he said he was “most ashamed”.
“He was not very ashamed at the time, I can tell you”, retorted Currie.
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The Gladstone Diaries by William Gladstone
If you have an entire wall of shelving to spare, I recommend picking up the 13 volumes of William Gladstone’s diaries. Oh, and the 14th – the index, including a dramatis personae of 20,500 people. Fourteen volumes seems like a lot, I know. But then, Benjamin Disraeli did call Gladstone “a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity”.
It took editor Colin Matthew 25 years to wade through all of the entries – which is quite good going, given that Gladstone started keeping a journal in 1825 during his time at Eton, continued throughout his four administrations, and cracked on until he was 87. The diary is so enduring and broad in scope that it isn’t merely a report of parliamentary politics, but a social document on pretty much the entire Victorian era.
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The best of the rest
Gyles Brandreth’s Breaking the Code offers a perspective on the Major years from an MP who wasn’t sleeping with him at the time. Former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown deconstructs the 90s over three volumes. Michael Gove once kept Tony Blair’s A Journey by his bedside. Nigel Lawson memorably said that “the NHS is the closest thing the English people have to a religion” in The View from No 11. And Harold Macmillan remains one of the best diarists to occupy No 10 (and more succinct than Gladstone).
• The caption of the second image in this article was amended on 17 December 2022. Barbara Castle is shown second from right, not third from right as an earlier version said.
