Russell Barnes

I confess I have always had a soft spot for Marcia Williams as she was responsible for setting me on my own political journey. As Linda McDougall’s excellent biography explains, when Marcia first entered Downing Street she was taken aback by the old-school culture that existed – especially the practice of recruiting secretaries in Downing Street’s Garden Rooms solely from elite London secretarial colleges.

Whilst all political memoirs agree on being commute-challengingly massive, beyond that they tend to fall into two distinct genres: overly technocratic plods through the writer’s parliamentary hobby horse or lengthy exercises in axe-grinding and point scoring now the writer has faded onto the back benches and beyond. Rory Stewart manages to combine both while reflecting on a political career in the Conservative Party that came to an end following his resignation after the 2019 leadership campaign.