Reviews and Comments

This is a gloomy book. It’s the third book I’ve read this year about how & why UK politics is broken, and it’s the gloomiest of the three. Dunt’s “How Westminster Works … And Why It Doesn’t” made many of the same points that Stewart makes in this book, but ended with a list of relatively small pragmatic suggestions for how it could all be fixed (many of which Dunt points out have been tried before and shown to work, just subsequently dismantled). Campbell’s “But What Can I Do?” is a call to arms – yes, it’s broken, but we can all play a part in fixing it. But Stewart’s book is the story of a man who believed … first in the institutions of government, and then in his capacity to bring change … but who had that belief shattered by the reality he encountered.

It’s also the story of a man who has quite incredible privilege. Which only makes it feel the more gloomy – if a man who can (almost as an aside) say how the then Prince of Wales had been a valuable mentor when he (Stewart) was setting up his Afghanistan charity, or who can just casually get a meeting with the leader of the Conservative Party to talk about running for Parliament, if he can’t make anything happen how can anyone else? Of course part of the problem seems to be that he’s not a natural politician and although he slowly learns on the job he’s still always painfully earnest and somehow a little naive.

And clearly it’s a story of burnout, by the end it’s clear that Stewart feels he wasted a decade of his life constantly thinking if he just made it to the next level (be an MP, be a junior minister, be a member of the Cabinet, whatever) then he’d begin to get something done. Probably if he’d managed to be Prime Minister that too would’ve turned out to be more circumscribed or badly incentivised than he’d hoped. In the final chapter he sounds defeated and like he wishes he’d got out early or never started, and done something more useful.

I did enjoy reading it, even tho it’s gloomy. And anyway, not every book has to set out to provide solutions. Stewart writes well, with a sense of humour at all times, and describes both people and situations in a way that brings them to vivid life. Particularly the little descriptions of people one recognises as public figures, where he mostly confirms they are just as bad behind the scenes as one had imagined. And even tho my politics are not the same as his, he definitely comes across as someone who genuinely tried his best to do the right thing for his constituency & country in all his various roles, in his own slightly odd, earnest, naive & privileged way.

This is the second “our politics is completely messed up” book that I’ve read in a row, and it made an interesting contrast to Ian Dunt’s “How Westminster Works … And Why It Doesn’t?”. In the latter Dunt argues convincingly that little of the system works on a fundamental level (partially on purpose, partially because the wrong incentives are in play), but Campbell is more interested in how the changes in our society over the last decade or so have been driven by and enabled the rise of populism in a way that we would once have thought of as unthinkable.

The book comes in two parts, the first is an examination of the problem as Campbell sees it – most of which was familiar to me from listening to the Rest is Politics podcast, but is presented here in a more coherent and structured form. Essentially our society is becoming ever more polarised in a feedback loop between populist politicians who are happy to lie and deceive if it means they win and a population who feel betrayed and left behind by the people who should be leading them so turn to cynicism. This is aided & abetted by a traditional media landscape that is no longer interested in finding out the truth but instead is focused on what will make them money, and by the rise of social media where outrage gets engagement and nuance sinks & dies.

The second part is a call to action, and a discussion of how anybody can work towards changing this – the answer to the question in the title of the book. Campbell has obviously got a wealth of experience in how to run a campaign, how to operate in politics and how to get your message across. So this part of the book is full of very practical discussion of subjects like leadership and how to do that well, how to build and operate within a good team, and so on. He ends this half by talking about how you get into politics yourself, even if you don’t want to be an elected politician (as he himself didn’t).

I was interested to read this book because of the promise of the first half, but it turned out to have little new given I’ve listened to every episode of the Rest is Politics. The second half then surprised me by being more interesting than I expected, because even though Campbell’s focus is on politics and political campaigning much of what he says is more broadly applicable. But I’m still unconvinced that getting into politics is something I’d want to do, or be terribly well suited to.

It’s a well written book, and an engaging read (which you’d expect, communication was his brief in the Blair administration after all). I’d recommend it even if you don’t want to get into politics.

Ian Dunt's "How Westminster Works … and Why It Doesn't" lives up to both parts of its title. Through the main chapters of the book he systematically explains how each part of the overall system operates, from choosing who stands in each constituency in a general election through to the role of the House of Lords in shaping legislation taking in all aspects of government along the way including the Civil Service. And for each part he details how the system as it exists incentivises counterproductive behaviour and outcomes. Sometimes deliberately (like how the time given for scrutiny of bills in the House of Commons is curtailed so that MPs have little chance to do anything other than vote how the whips tell them) and sometimes accidentally (like how there is no way to reward a civil servant who builds up expertise in a particular area, as in order to get a pay rise or move on in their career they need to move to a different role so their expertise is lost to the system – which reminds me a lot of my time in academia which also didn't value continuity or institutional memory).

There are also two interludes that illustrate his points with case studies, one at the beginning which details the changes to the Probation Service under Grayling which took a functional system & broke it, and one half way through that looks at the disastrous failure to evacuate people from Afghanistan when the Taliban took it back in 2021.

The final chapter is an epilogue which offers suggested solutions to these systemic problems, all of which feel feasible and in some cases have even been tried before & been successful. This is in one sense hopeful, and I think that was Dunt's intent – to end on a high note – but I found it more depressing. There are so many simple things that could make the governance of our country better and more effective, but there are no incentives for those who take power in the current system to change it. The only hope really is that change always seems impossible till it happens.

Overall the book was well written & engaging, and an easy read. I also liked the structure of the bibliography which is not just a list of books but a piece of prose which talks about which books are relevant to which sections of this book as well as giving page references. Despite ending up with a bit of a sense of despair (it's broken, they know it and some of them even like it that way) I am glad I read this and would recommend it.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this (bought it on a whim having read the back cover blurb and a couple of the first pages). The format of numbered sections & sub-sections, each relatively brief, was a bit off-putting at first but I warmed to it as I read on – a sort of microcosm for what the book was talking about, using a format more usually found in a religious text to frame secular matters.

Overall it was very much up my street – I was brought up in a religious family, attending a (very) High Church Anglo-Catholic church throughout my childhood, but even though my faith lapsed long ago I find myself at times missing the ritual and framework of it. At times I find myself googling in a not-very-hopeful way for secular contemplative rituals (and never finding anything that's not twee or new age or flat out religious having done a find & replace on "God" with "Nature"). So the general theme of not throwing the baby of ritual/structure out with the bathwater of superstition was to my tastes.

I thought the book was at its best when de Botton was talking about what he saw as the purposes behind the trappings of religion (much of it about providing structure to one's life and reminding oneself of one's best self; as well as building community through shared experiences).

But it did rather suffer from a "can't get there from here" problem when he started to speculate on how these trappings could be applied in a secular context. Sometimes it felt like his suggestions could only happen if history and people were totally other than they are. And other times it was more that his prescriptions were so vague as to be almost vacuous. To be fair, I don't think providing solutions was the point of the book, even if it did leave me a bit unsatisfied.

Despite that, I do think it will reward a re-read in the future, it has the flavour of a book that will strike me differently each time I read it.