Advising on everything from “how to sympathise” with constituents to “how to stay married”, Paul Flynn’s practical guide, How to Be an MP, is the top summer reading choice for his fellow UK politicians.
Bookseller Blackwell’s surveyed 650 MPs about their summer reading lists, with just under a third responding. The humorous guide for backbenchers from the MP for Newport West was the most popular choice, reported the Bookseller. Just one other title was named on multiple MPs’ lists, Boris Johnson’s The Churchill Factor, the mayor of London’s exploration of the life of the prime minister he describes as “the resounding human rebuttal to all who think history is the story of vast and impersonal economic forces”.
Other political titles MPs told Blackwell’s they were planning to take away with them when their summer recess begins on 21 July included Robert Rogers and Rhodri Walters’s How Parliament Works, Mark Blyth’s Austerity, a history of austerity measures over the last 100 years arguing it is a dangerous idea that doesn’t work, and FBI al-Qaeda investigator Ali Soufan’s exploration of counter-terrorism measures, The Black Banners.
But Blackwell’s found there was also room for fiction in politicians’ summer reading, with Harper Lee’s just-released Go Set a Watchman named as a novel to relax with, along with Jessie Burton’s bestselling historical novel The Miniaturist, and CJ Sansom’s new Matthew Shardlake novel Lamentation. Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, Jeffrey Archer’s The Sins of the Father, and Alexander McCall Smith’s The Novel Habits of Happiness were also cited by the politicians.
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