Here’s some summer reading inspiration for MPs as Parliament goes into recess
The list switches from bestsellers to memoirs, a mix of fiction and non-fiction.
While it may seem like MPs have barely been back in Westminster for five minutes, it’s time to offer up some book inspo for our politicians as they begin their summer recess.
They could let their hair down by immersing themselves in fiction or opt for more weighty political tomes to get them ready for the tough work once Parliament is back in session in September.
If they’re trying to keep up with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, last summer he read Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich, a Nobel prize-winning collection of eyewitness accounts from the reactor disaster of 1986.
Elsewhere, there is political etiquette in reading the works penned by your colleagues. In the same year David Cameron read Coming Up Trumps: A Memoir by Baroness Trumpington, Ed Miliband read Ten Cities That Made An Empire by then Stoke Central MP Tristram Hunt, now director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Nick Clegg read The Cruel Victory by previous Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown.
To follow the trend, current MPs could choose Johnny Mercer’s autobiography We Were Warriors, which was published in June. In it the Plymouth MP charts his journey from Afghanistan to Westminster.
Alternatively, they could reach for Rachel Reeves’s book Alice In Westminster: The Political Life Of Alice Bacon, chronicling the life of the former Labour MP for Leeds North East, which was published late in 2016. Reeves serves the constituency of Leeds West. Former Labour frontbencher Harriet Harman, the MP for Camberwell and Peckham, published A Woman’s Work in February.
Into The Water is probably the book which everyone will read on holiday this year, thereby offering even the most out-of-touch politician an “I know the price of milk” equivalent in page-turner form.
For anyone wanting to mimic Obama’s 2016 list completely, they’d need to also pick up Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, H Is For Hawk by Helen Macdonald and Seveneves by Neal Stephenson.
Miliband attracted attention in 2011 for the weightiness of his holiday reading, including Leadership On The Line: Staying Alive Through The Dangers Of Leading by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky.
Perhaps a good book as we go into conference season following the summer hiatus?
You can only imagine he still has plenty more pages to go.
