Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson (Hutchinson Heinemann/Penguin Press)
The most readable of several accounts of the declining years of the Biden presidency and the former president’s catastrophic decision to run for re-election. The authors blame a tight group of Biden insiders for concealing his condition — although they are careful not to argue that Biden was incapable of taking key decisions in the last year of his presidency.
Ungovernable: The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip by Simon Hart (Macmillan)
Hart was chief whip of the Conservative party when Rishi Sunak was prime minister, and before that was a minister for Boris Johnson. This was a period when the Tories were ripping themselves apart and the morale and behaviour of MPs was plummeting. The result is one of the raciest political diaries of recent years. His eye-popping anecdotes include a late-night phone call from an MP imprisoned in a brothel.
Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund (Bodley Head)
