Book Reviews

As a budding political apparatchik, my first job out of university was as a junior parliamentary assistant to Alan Duncan MP. Working for him was never taxing because it was never boring. Nicknamed ‘Hunky Dunky’, he was well known in the Tory fraternity. Too young to be a grandee and too old to be a rising star, he occupied a special space in the parliamentary party, never part of a clique yet consistently present during his 27 years in parliament. We’d often remark — to his annoyance — that he was the Chips Channon of his generation, since both often ended up on the wrong side of the winning team. How apt, then, that the updated Channon diaries and Duncan’s own should appear within weeks of each other. In the Thick of It documents the Conservative party’s relapse into its masochistic tendency: the years 2015 to 2019 when the Brexit wars raged.