PLANES, TRAINS AND TOILET DOORS

A fabulously salty romp through the rooms, restaurants, museums, beach huts and swimming pools through the turning points in politics over the last 200 years. Forget Downing Street and the Westminster corridors of power or the cloisters of parliament at Westminster in the bubble. Many of the key elements that have shaped modern British politics have been in car parks, village halls and seaside resorts, from Pitt the Younger's Putney Heath duel to finding Margaret Thatcher's voice coach on a train, Harold Wilson's 'Scilly' season holidays to John Major's dental appointment clearing his path to No.10, the swimming pool at Cliveden and antics with Christine Keeler on a summer's evening in 1961, Dominic Cummings and Barnard Castle 2020. Here are schools and hospitals, furniture and chairs, guildhalls and municipal buildings, high days and holidays, adventures in water, food and drink, grand houses and travelling railways and airfields and the M11 speed camera. Matt Chorley bursts the bubble of politician's pomposity and shows them in all their hilarious ridiculousness. Full page colour artworks by Morten Morland which are genius caricatures, pinpricking the pomposity. 290pp.