Dan Jones

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I normally make it my policy when writing book reviews never to read anyone else’s.

I normally make it my policy when writing book reviews never to read anyone else’s.

I normally make it my policy when writing book reviews never to read anyone else’s. It clogs up your mind with someone else’s prejudices and wrong opinions,where- as in fact you are being paid to bang on about your own.

This week I broke my rule and read the Guardian review of Ben Wilson’s new book. It was by some sort of lawyer chap and it was very serious. It made me remember why I gave up the Guardian, which is a news- paper for quinoa-eaters and Arsenal fans. But I digress. I read their review because I had heard a disturbing rumour that the reviewer had accused Wilson of touting in his book for a job as David Cameron’s next speechwriter.

It turned out that this rumour was true, which just shows how little research some people do. The Ben Wilson I remember from our overlapping days at Pembroke, Cambridge was just about the unlikeliest Conservative you can imagine. The most Tory thing I can remember him doing was on the eve of the history prelims, when he and an accomplice unrolled about a half-ton of unlaid turf and arranged it in the courtyard over which the first-year undergrads’ bedroom windows looked, to spell the words ‘carpe diem’. You could just about have read that as an exhortation to the spirit of Thatcherite entrepreneurialism. Otherwise his politics were turn-of-the-century Whig. (The 18th century.)

Anyway, you heard it here first: Ben Wilson is not to be the Cameroon Jon Favreau. (I did telephone him to check.) But politicians of all hues would be well advised to read his book. In it, Wilson charts the historical development of the idea of liberty in Britain: what it is, how it evolved, and what recent governments have done to unpick its legal basis.

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