Servants of the People is Andrew Rawnsley's account of the first term of Tony Blair's government. All Out War and Fall Out are Tim Shipman's accounts of the Brexit campaign and it's aftermath up to the end of 2017. Both authors are journalists experienced at wringing narrative from messy real world situations and all three books are excellent reads. Tim Shipman's two books in particular read like thrillers.
Rawnsley constructs his book as a series of anecdotes, mostly morality tales where New Labour's belief that it can spin it's way out of trouble winds up dumping it in more, or (at least twice) Peter Mandleson's failure to come clean to his friends means they cannot help him, or (often) Gordon and Tony's failure to communicate exacerbates a situation beyond all reasonable bounds. His overriding narrative is of Tony Blair's fear of ending up yet another single term Labour prime minister, thus all the individual battles add up into one story culminating in the 2001 election victory.
If there is a problem with this technique it is that, by focusing on the problems of New Labour, there is no explanation as to why they deserve a second term. Rawnsley occasionally has to point out that, however much an amusing basket-case Labour were, the Tories at the time were even worse.
Shipman on the other hand is much more focused on the overall arc of first the campaign and then the lead up to and play out of the 2017 election.
In the first book he has two stories to balance, one for each side. The Leave side is a tale of insurgency: the underdog with a lot of guile and a lot of luck unseating the favourite. The Remain side is a tale of hubris: Cameron and team's failure to ever really believe they might lose meant they were fighting with their eyes not on victory but on what happens after. Consequently they refused to risk either Britain's diplomatic relations or the future harmony of the conservative party by, for example, making a pronouncement on Turkey or making personal attacks on Boris Johnson.
The hubris continues in Fall Out as, similarly, failure to realise that the election might result in less than a landslide ends up in failure to fight it properly. In this book the mechanics of disfunction are dissected across a large cast of characters from cabinet ministers to political aids, and in particular Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, the chief villains of the piece. With no conclusion available Shipman ends on the final agreement of 'Sufficient Progress' in December 2017, which May somehow achieves despite trouble from within her cabinet and from the DUP. It gives, at least, a sense of things moving on.
What I find really interesting though, is how both narratives have changed in the context of subsequent events.
Things did not move on, and now, almost over a year later, what looked then like an untenable situation has largely remained unchanged. "Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus". The Tim Shipman books read, in this context, less an account of great events than of ridiculous accidents and dumb incompetence. All the heat and noise and manoeuvring leading to absolutely nothing. The UK still in the EU and Theresa May still Prime Minister. However events resolve themselves from now on it seems very unlikely that this will ever feel (even to sympathetic readers) like the account of a great step in the journey of a nation.
The further back we go the more context corrupts the narrative. Boris Johnson's hopeless leadership campaign now looks like it might be just a blip in his inevitable idiotic rise. A tactical victory for the Remain side during the campaign, bouncing the Leave side into admitting the UK would leave the Single Market, now looks like a strategical blunder for remainers. David Cameron's attempt to renegotiate the UK's membership now looks less like a half-arsed PR exercise and more like a fundamental misunderstanding of what the EU is.
In servants of the People the elephant in the room, Iraq, can be felt on every page; in every bumbling PR disaster, in every spat between ministers, in every bad news story, it all feels so small compared to what was to come. Worse though is the lead up to the invasion of Kosovo, which Rawnsley uses as something of a key character event and heart of the book. The reader is invited to admire Blair's tenacity and zeal when faced with a true moral choice, his certainty, his belief in doing the right thing. But the reader cannot. The reader can only remember the bloodshed to come and shudder.
