This chapter argues that the genre of Political Life-Writing (PLW) reflects, and to some extent has shaped, hegemonic understandings of what UK politics is. PLW serves here as an umbrella term for three sub-genres: memoirs, diaries and letters, and biographies. This sub-categorisation does not capture all forms of life-writing by or about the politically active. Certainly, there are many other ways, such as oral history, of capturing auto/biographical memory.Footnote ¹ The three sub-genres are, however, highly recognisable types of books, which form a clear starting point for a consideration of how PLW has developed. It is books which are the focus of the chapter, though it must be stressed that they need to be considered in the context of a broader eco-system that links publishing, the media, and politics – a kind of political–celebrity–industrial complex.

In this world, the physical book has remained important, even given the audiobook boom and the advent of e-books. Yet opening and reading the physical book is only one mechanism by which the content of the text is disseminated. Furthermore, books are not merely texts. They are also cultural objects. During the twentieth century, they became cheaper and more accessible for purchase by working-class and middle-class individuals, who could now afford to fill their homes with ‘furniture books’.Footnote ² These could serve as statements of political and literary identity. Whether and which biographies, diaries, or memoirs of politicians are displayed in one’s home or office sends a message (if not always an easily decipherable one) about the opinions and values of the owner.

Biography as a genre has received less scholarly attention than memoirs and diaries, which have merited extensive discussion in the literature.Footnote ³ Key contributions have focused on the related themes of reputation management and official secrecy.Footnote ⁴ A number of works have explored how prominent politicians have sought to evade or bend the rules of confidentiality and to exploit their own privileged access to sources in order to cast themselves in a favourable perspective.Footnote ⁵ David Richards and Helen Mathers have extended the field of debate by exploring memoirs and diaries in the light of the ‘Westminster Model’ of politics and its attendant assumptions. They argue that ‘the narratives found in ministerial memoirs’ tend ‘to offer a heavily agency-centred account, driven by a concern with legacy and the desire to convey a particular version of history’.Footnote ⁶

This previous scholarship is of great value, but there are important issues which it fails to address. First, while it is acknowledged that much PLW is an elite exercise with a heavy masculine bias, the issue of race is neglected.Footnote ⁷ Second, there is an implicit, unstated assumption that the text of the book should be the central topic of enquiry. That is to say that, if books are important, it is because people pick them up, read them, and are influenced by the messages they contain. That, however, is only part of the truth. Audiences can become aware of books’ messages through a range of other mechanisms, such as blurbs, reviews, and author interviews (known collectively as ‘para-texts’). Third, the significance of PLW books as physical objects is forgotten – though the concept of ‘books as furniture’ and other non-textual uses have been explored productively by book historians in other settings.Footnote ⁸ Finally, there has been little effort to ascertain reader (or non-reader) response.Footnote ⁹ The materials gathered by the sociological research organisation Mass Observation (MO) are critical here. Explicit comments on political (auto) biography are fairly rare in the responses offered by ordinary people to MO ‘directives’. They certainly can’t be taken as representative of the views of the population. Nevertheless, they are often suggestive of ways in which PLW was regarded, consumed, and displayed.Footnote ¹⁰

Publishers’ choices about what to commission have generally been based upon an unstated hierarchy of who in politics is most important. For anyone versed in mainstream media coverage, this hierarchy seems highly intuitive. In terms of diaries and memoirs, prime ministers are the top, ministers next; advisers with beans to spill and gossipy backbench MPs are roughly on a par. Senior civil servants and ambassadors, who, in the era of ‘megaphone bureaucracy’, have increasingly been willing to publish frank memories, are also appealing prospects.Footnote ¹¹ By contrast, local government leaders, MEPs, and European Commissioners are generally not. The hierarchy is not unshifting: it is unsurprising that trade union leaders, during the 1970s and 1980s, were placed higher than they are today. It is fair to say, too, that literary quality and the inherent interest of the tale do count; the mere fact of having been in the Cabinet is not enough to guarantee a contract – though having been Prime Minister, however briefly, probably is.

Although women have been disadvantaged in terms of their ability to get into Westminster politics, it is not clear that, once they have managed it, they have been at a disadvantage in publishing life-writing. Krista Cowman notes that although only eighty women were elected as MPs between 1918 and 1964, thirteen of them (16%) produced autobiographical books.Footnote ¹² Calculating the equivalent rate for their much more numerous male peers would be laborious, but it seems likely that the women outperformed the men, doubtless partly due to perceived novelty value. Nevertheless, the reception of their works could be strongly gendered. In the 1970s, the former Labour Cabinet minister Richard Crossman controversially kick-started what was seen as a ‘new genre of near-contemporary diaries’.Footnote ¹³ His colleague Barbara Castle then followed suit. She came under fire for her indiscretions, leading The Guardian to spring to her defence. Her critics had suggested, the paper argued, ‘that Crossman was somehow to be forgiven because of the massiveness of his wayward intellect and his seriousness of purpose while Mrs. Castle is to be condemned because she is no more than a weak weeping woman with an eye for a quick buck’.Footnote ¹⁴

It is only a minority of the politically active, even at the elite level, who have a desire to publish in the first place. Some make a deliberate choice not to do so. For example, Labour leader Michael Foot, though a very accomplished writer, chose not to write his memoirs, and instead cooperated with biographers.Footnote ¹⁵ Cabinet ministers cannot take it for granted that they will be able to publish their recollections (and some interesting memoirs remain unpublished).Footnote ¹⁶ The size of the potential advance would sometimes be too small to buy enough time to write the book.Footnote ¹⁷ Political memoirs have not always been good commercial propositions. For example, Weidenfeld & Nicolson ‘lost a fortune’ on the Castle diaries.Footnote ¹⁸ There may be other reasons why they are commissioned, though. Publishers have sometimes been suspected of currying favour by giving politicians advances that were unlikely to be earnt back.Footnote ¹⁹

It is largely taken for granted that former prime ministers will write their memoirs, though this was far from ubiquitous before 1945. (This was partly because many former occupants of No. 10 were old and/or ill when they left office.) Dating back to Lloyd George, books by ex-prime ministers can be highly – and sometimes controversially – lucrative for their authors.Footnote ²⁰ Since then, all ex-prime ministers, apart from Rishi Sunak (as of 2025), have produced at least one volume, and several have published multiple volumes. However, May and Truss’s books were not formal autobiographies, but rather works which drew on the authors’ experiences to make wider political arguments.Footnote ²¹ One reviewer described May’s effort as ‘so boldly different it creates a mini-genre all of its own’.Footnote ²² Another commented, however, that ‘despite this ostensibly different approach, The Abuse of Power reveals itself as an attempt to rehabilitate May’s reputation after her acrimonious exit from Downing Street in 2019’.Footnote ²³

Those within the charmed Westminster circle are at an advantage when it comes to making it into print (though those within the most charmed circle of all, the secret services, have of course faced unique challenges).Footnote ²⁴ That is not to say, however, that less privileged political actors are always denied the opportunity to publish. Though communism has been a somewhat marginal force, communist autobiography was for a time a significant genre (or sub-genre). It ‘had an explicit “exemplary” function, providing a mirror to the party of the ideals’ which party members were expected to embody.Footnote ²⁵ Prominent extra-parliamentary campaigners, such as CND’s Bruce Kent, were also able to publish memoirs.Footnote ²⁶ Doreen Lawrence, mother of the murdered Black teenager Stephen Lawrence, has done so too (her book appeared before she became a member of the House of Lords).Footnote ²⁷ We may imagine, though, that many potential autobiographers have ruled themselves out of the running on the assumption (likely very often correct) that publishers will not want to print their stories.

The hierarchy for biographical subjects is somewhat different. Biographies can be written of dead subjects as well as living ones, and the ‘forgotten’ or tragic individual may be more appealing as a choice than the moderately influential but uninspiring office-holder. Victor Grayson has merited repeat biographies in part because of his mysterious disappearance; John Stonehouse, because he faked his own death.Footnote ²⁸ By contrast, it seems inconceivable that anyone will ever publish a book on, say, Fred Peart, even though his relatively uneventful career has the potential to cast light on significant aspects of British politics.Footnote ²⁹ At the same time, unless there is a dramatic or scandalous angle, the broad sense of ‘who counts’ is roughly the same for biographies as for autobiographical writing. High-profile women have received a fair amount of biographical attention. However, given the assumption that members of parliament are at the top of the tree, and the historic experience of exclusion, it is hardly surprising that there are few biographies of women politicians of colour. The picture may be expected to change to a degree, given the more diverse composition of recent Cabinets, but at the moment Robin Bunce and Samara Linton’s biography of Diane Abbott stands out as a rare exception.Footnote ³⁰

It is plausible, then, to assert that PLW reinforces dominant understandings of what politics is, and where it takes place, simply by virtue of who the authors or subjects of the books are. The proliferation of political biographies – which is by no means common to every democratic country – can accentuate the belief that political developments are primarily driven by individual agency, even if this is not what all the various authors intend. As George Egerton has argued, ‘political memoir functions in modern cultures to conceptualize popular understanding of historical processes largely in terms of the dramas of political leadership’ rather than in terms of broader socio-economic forces.Footnote ³¹ Book titles carry their own messages: From Workshop to War Cabinet, A Life at the Centre, and The Downing Street Years.Footnote ³² The texts themselves often reproduce a Westminster-centred view. In his comparison of interwar social democratic memoirs, Stefan Berger notes that Labour Party authors presented narratives of progress in which elections and Parliament took pride of place. ‘The British autobiographies leave no doubt where they see the prime location of that overall move towards better times: in parliament and in the steady progress of Labour in increasing its parliamentary representation.’ German Social Democrats, for their part, placed much more stress on party work.Footnote ³³

It is hard to be precise about how popular the three sub-genres have been. Bestseller lists, library circulation figures, media or archival reports of book sales, and (for the more recent period) Nielsen BookScan can be helpful at the indicative level. But there is also the problem of weighting, that is, the issue of whether sales translated into impact, and whether that impact was short- or long-term. Churchill’s multi-volume The Second World War has achieved high sales across the decades since it was published, but it is hard to measure its reception by ordinary readers.Footnote ³⁴ (Serialisation in the American magazine Life apparently depressed sales of that publication, due in part to anti-British sentiment, though the reaction in the UK was likely much more positive.)Footnote ³⁵ In fact, the main claim that has been made for the book’s influence is of a different kind. David Reynolds’s landmark analysis suggests that, through his special access to sources that were unavailable to others, Churchill put himself ‘in command of history’. On the one hand, prior to the opening of the archives, subsequent accounts often relied on the information that he had chosen to provide. On the other, his periodisation and labelling of events had a profound influence on how the war was discussed.Footnote ³⁶

This case is simply a prominent example of a wider phenomenon. Memoirs (and diaries and letters) can be mined by journalists for juicy quotations, and citation by historians often gives them a residual legacy. In other words, though a mass readership naturally helps, autobiographical writing does not necessarily need one to achieve a lasting impact. In 1962, the academic (and future Labour MP) David Marquand reviewed the final volume of the memoirs of Hugh Dalton, a former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer. He compared them to the memoirs of Dalton’s former government colleagues. ‘History, especially the history of the working-class movement, has a built-in bias in favour of the literate intellectual, and against the inarticulate, the ill-educated, or the shy’, Marquand observed. Thus, ‘there may be a danger that Lord Dalton may be given an even more prominent place in history than he deserves, simply because his memoirs are so much franker, more attractive, and more readable than Lord [Clement] Attlee’s or Lord [Herbert] Morrison’s’.Footnote ³⁷

It should not be doubted that some members of the public do sit down and read books in all three sub-genres from cover to cover. Former Chancellor Denis Healey’s autobiography sold well, surely in part because of the quality of the writing.Footnote ³⁸ The diaries of rogue Tory Alan Clark, with their admixture of sex and self-pity, became a cultural phenomenon (and were adapted for television).Footnote ³⁹ Yet, even if some books are read thoroughly by many people, the claim for the centrality of PLW must rest on more than this. These types of books are generally accompanied by ‘para-texts’ – reviews, serialisations, interviews, and so forth.Footnote ⁴⁰ These are often very extensive, especially in the case of very high-profile politicians.

It is more than possible that many people both watched the TV documentary series The Downing Street Years and read Margaret Thatcher’s book of the same name, which it accompanied.Footnote ⁴¹ At the same time, it’s no secret that bibliophiles buy many books that they never read. Pragmatically, one is often able to extract key points from a review or serialisation, or to simply conclude that one doesn’t want or need to read it. One MO respondent noted of The Downing Street Years: ‘No I won’t be rushing out to buy it, but I am fascinated by the reaction to this book. Her star seemed to be on the wane over the summer …. The publication of the book has meant that suddenly she is being lauded again.’Footnote ⁴² Of course, the accounts given in para-texts may represent a book’s true content poorly. In 1995 The Sunday Times, desperate to whip up interest in their serialisation of Thatcher’s The Path To Power, created a questionable story about the book attacking John Major over Europe.Footnote ⁴³ Party conference season is a good time for publication; ‘revelations’ can be used by the publishers to drum up interest and exploited by the media as evidence of backbiting and splits.

The significance of memoirs (and other political books) as material objects should not be ignored. Signings offer members of the public the chance of a brief interaction with a famous politician in addition to the autographed souvenir. One Mass Observer, in an intensely detailed description of her bookshelves, noted that they held: ‘Many paperbacks, some political biographies – David Owen – Roy Jenkins – Shirley Williams etc. We were founder members of the SDP and have met them all.’Footnote ⁴⁴ (Years later, Williams called her memoirs Climbing the Bookshelves.)Footnote ⁴⁵ Piled high in bookshops, supermarkets, and discount stores, glossy autobiographies stand to make a visual impression upon many who have no intention even of reading the blurb. Another MO respondent commented: ‘Alastair Campbell’s “Blair Years“ are now remaindered at Poundland which I wouldn’t touch anyway!’Footnote ⁴⁶

As a boy, John Lennon lived with his aunt and uncle, who had Churchill’s volumes on display.Footnote ⁴⁷ This did not, however, endear their author to the future Beatle, who later discarded his given middle name, Winston. The books may well have been read, if not by Lennon, then by other family members. But the mere fact of putting them on the shelf served some kind of symbolic function. It does not, of course, follow that everyone who owned a book by a politician admired that person, or that there is any neat correlation between the books on a shelf and the politics of the shelf’s owner. Nonetheless, book collections do say something about the people who assemble them, who, indeed, may be making conscious statements about themselves and their politics through their decisions about what they exhibited – a kind of literary-political self-fashioning. One MO respondent who owned a large array of volumes, including Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples, admitted: ‘I do not really need so many books I suppose having them is a form of vanity. My book cases look very impressive!’Footnote ⁴⁸

In contrast to memoirs and diaries, political biographies were well established as a genre at the start of the twentieth century. Victorian biographies, in general, have an almost legendary reputation for stodginess. Though this is not wholly undeserved, the picture needs to be qualified. To begin with, far from being uniformly deferential, many contemporaries were scathingly contemptuous of their political opponents. Consider, for example, Edward Harper’s pamphlet, Mr. Gladstone Answered: The Inconsistencies, Absurdities, and Contradictions in Mr Gladstone’s Public Career: Being a Letter to Him in Reply to His ‘Chapter of Autobiography’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The often tedious multi-volume works by ‘memory custodians’ need to be read in the light of the need of politicians’ relatives and supporters to cast them as statesmen, defending them against the vociferous attacks that they had often suffered while they were alive.

The Victorian style of biography continued into the twentieth century. Roy Foster has provided a detailed analysis of Winston Churchill’s 1906 biography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, showing how Winston manipulated evidence to suit his own views and political convenience.Footnote ⁵⁰ Nevertheless, such works did provide a useful service. They reproduced in extenso evidence to which the authors often had privileged access, albeit often in bowdlerised form. It is worth noting that when Lytton Strachey wrote his famous takedown of several Eminent Victorians, he did not trouble to do any archival research. He simply mined the worthy biographical doorstops on his subjects that had already been published.Footnote ⁵¹

None of the four figures discussed in Strachey’s book were politicians, but it likely had some effect on expanding the limits of the sayable. There was no general revolution, however. Frank revelations about politicians’ private lives long remained off-limits. Roy Harrod’s 1951 biography of Strachey’s lover John Maynard Keynes kept Keynes’s homosexual tendencies under wraps.Footnote ⁵² They were not publicly revealed until the first volume of Michael Holroyd’s biography of Strachey appeared in 1967.Footnote ⁵³ Though Keynes did end up in the Lords, he was not really a politician – but non-politicians need to be included in our discussion, because biographies of them could reveal information about politicians and affect how they were viewed.

Thus, in the fallout of World War I, the ‘battle of the memoirs’ between politicians was complemented by biographical attempts to vindicate the memories of deceased military men who could no longer speak for themselves. As John F. Naylor has shown, there were strenuous efforts by the Cabinet Office to regulate the use of official information in such works.Footnote ⁵⁴ There was, though, a recognised right to self-defence (or posthumous defence by others) when the person concerned had been attacked in print. But this could backfire. C. E. Callwell’s 1927 biography of Henry Wilson reproduced diary extracts revealing the conflict between the ‘brass hats’ (soldiers) and the ‘frocks’ (politicians), of whom Wilson had been extremely disdainful.Footnote ⁵⁵ The overall effect was to damage Wilson’s reputation, but it also brought inside information that could be used by future political biographers into the public domain.

Few interwar political biographies were as revealing as Callwell’s. However, overtly critical treatments did appear, such as Victor Germains’s The Tragedy of Winston Churchill (1931) and L. MacNeill Weir’s The Tragedy of Ramsay MacDonald (1938).Footnote ⁵⁶ Germains was a professional writer; Weir had been MacDonald’s private secretary. Up until this point, biographies tended to be written by journalists, or by people (often themselves politicians) who had had some acquaintance with the subject of their book. Post–World War II, academics became increasingly prominent as political biographers of the recently deceased. Keith Feiling, of Christ Church, Oxford, was a historian of the Tory Party in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His sympathetic biography of Neville Chamberlain appeared in 1946. It was written at the request of Chamberlain’s family and drew upon his papers.Footnote ⁵⁷ Whether or not G. M. Young should be described as an academic is a moot point: he held positions in Oxford at the start and end of his career but did freelance historical work for much of it. At any rate, he was Stanley Baldwin’s choice as a biographer, though the results (published in 1952) were the opposite of what the book’s subject would have wanted.Footnote ⁵⁸ We can observe here an important phase in the emergence of the discipline of ‘contemporary history’; note also (non-biographical) works by Lewis Namier and Reginald Bassett.Footnote ⁵⁹

Alan Bullock’s mammoth biography of Ernest Bevin (1960–83) was a landmark.Footnote ⁶⁰ Bullock was another Oxford figure. Though he relied in part on papers made available to him by Arthur Deakin, Bevin’s successor as head of the TGWU, he also drew on an impressive variety of other archives, as well as interviewing almost two hundred people. The proliferation of this type of scholarship was doubtless linked in part to the post-war expansion of the universities and the changing regime of disclosure of official records. The Public Records Act of 1958 created a framework by which most government papers would be released after fifty years. In 1967 this was amended to thirty years.Footnote ⁶¹ This meant that although Bullock was not able to draw on official records for his 1967 volume on Bevin’s period as wartime Minister of Labour, he could do so for the period of the Attlee government.

Private initiative also played a role. Hugh Dalton donated his archive to the LSE, and this (including his fascinating diary) became a valuable source for many writers. The Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge was opened in 1973 and attracted many important papers. The Beaverbrook Library was short-lived (1967–75), but its collections (originally gathered by Lord Beaverbrook himself) ended up in what are now the Parliamentary Archives. It has been credited with triggering the rise of ‘Lloyd George Studies’.Footnote ⁶²

The 1960s through the 1990s were a kind of high period for political biography. Here, one sees a variety of phenomena in parallel. First, the official biography of Churchill (1966–88).Footnote ⁶³ This has been portrayed, with a fair degree of justice, as a celebratory and uncritical chronicle that failed to offer systematic analysis, almost the apotheosis of the Victorian approach. But it, and its documentary companion volumes, made available a mass of information, plenty of which was not creditable to Churchill. There is no evidence that the authors/editors engaged in large-scale bowdlerisation. Second, those biographies of politicians that are written by other politicians. These could be very distinguished, as in the cases of Michael Foot on Bevan and Roy Jenkins on Asquith.Footnote ⁶⁴ Third, biographies written by journalists or independent scholars, such as John Grigg’s (incomplete) study of Lloyd George, Kenneth Harris on Attlee, and the former academic John Campbell on figures from F. E. Smith to Edward Heath.Footnote ⁶⁵ Fourth, academic biographies written for a mass market. Here, it is Ben Pimlott’s books on Hugh Dalton (1985) and Harold Wilson (1992) that stand out as works that reshaped the popular as well as the scholarly understanding of their subjects.Footnote ⁶⁶

The Dalton biography was unusual, in that it showed a neglected figure to have been genuinely politically consequential, and at the same time, a fascinating (if much-hated) person.Footnote ⁶⁷ Featuring repressed homosexuality, a dead daughter, reliance on risky prescription drugs, and a spectacular Budget leak that derailed the hero’s career, the tale was much more interesting than the life stories of most politicians. Pimlott may not have done the job perfectly, but he did it so well that it seems highly unlikely that a further biography of Dalton will be attempted. With Wilson, Pimlott did not have the same rich material to work with, but in a context in which Wilson’s reputation had sat very low since his retirement, the mere fact that a biographer found some positive things to say seemed like a radical intervention. It is this type of effect that many biographers strive for, but few achieve.

Pimlott was quite frank that – as a moderate social democrat and former Labour candidate – he wrote with a sense of political commitment. During the battles of the 1980s, writing about Dalton ‘became a way of expressing my own defiant belief that – contrary to a right-wing view that serious history was about the Establishment, and a left-wing one that true “labour history” looked only at the rank and file – Labour had a heritage in high politics, and high ideas, that needed examining’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Yet Pimlott himself was more than a little disenchanted with the genre. In his 1989 inaugural lecture, he observed that:

He called for ‘a radical with the arrogance of a Picasso or a Joyce to smash our encrusted expectations’.Footnote ⁶⁹ He later conceded that this call seemed ‘a bit earnest’ and also ‘rather millenarian’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Peter Clarke’s The Cripps Version (2002) did involve experimentation with genre conventions; it was led by the sources that Stafford Cripps had left in his own voice rather than providing a wholly rounded account of his career.Footnote ⁷¹ Clarke notes today that Pimlott ‘was right about the problem but unsure about the answer. His own work on Dalton actually changed the genre in its approach I think, certainly making a bigger public and literary impact than the existing convention of political biography’.Footnote ⁷² However, there has never been a fundamental disruption of the kind Pimlott hoped for.

Though excellent biographies have continued to appear, during the twenty-first century the genre arguably became less important to the national conversation. For example, Charles Moore’s official biography of Margaret Thatcher was a thorough and creditable work that included some revelations, but it was unlikely to shift readers’ established views.Footnote ⁷³ There has been a continued and perhaps growing trend for serving MPs to publish biographies (and other historical works). In 2017, Rachel Reeves performed a service by publishing Life of the Labour MP Alice Bacon, who rose to become a junior minister under Wilson.Footnote ⁷⁴ Yet new and interesting subjects have seemed in short supply. Nick Thomas-Symonds, another shadow minister, has written biographies of Attlee, Bevan, and Wilson.Footnote ⁷⁵ The books are well-researched and include some interesting new information, but one cannot avoid the sense that familiar fields are being reploughed for relatively little reward.

Producing a compelling biography requires the location of a sweet spot: the significance and interest of the person; new documentary sources; and, if possible, interviews with friends, relatives, colleagues, and subordinates. When a politician had played a role, however minor, in either World War I or II, some level of interest was almost guaranteed. But the fact is that the lives of most politicians from the 1980s onwards have not been inherently worthy of study, even where they have colourful personalities and private lives. Their experiences before politics have generally revolved around getting into politics. At the same time, the rise of ‘sofa government’ has been accompanied by an apparent decline in the quality of governmental record-keeping. Strings of WhatsApp messages may well find their way into the hands of friendly journalists; they won’t necessarily be available to future historians, except perhaps when requisitioned for official purposes such as the public enquiry into the Covid pandemic.

Memoirs and biographies have often drawn upon diaries, thereby blurring the lines between the PLW sub-genres. Politicians have often made use of their own diaries (as well as of letters) when writing their autobiographies. Inevitably, this involves selectivity, and sometimes it has also involved bowdlerisation. This may be for reasons of official secrecy, to avoid embarrassing former colleagues, or for fear of legal action. It may also be done to burnish the image or the reputation of the diarist/memoirist. The same is true in respect of editions of diaries that politicians publish themselves, sometimes while still politically active.Footnote ⁷⁶ Families, friends, executors, and editors may also influence the shape of posthumous publication. The classic example is that of the Conservative MP Henry ‘Chips’ Channon. His lover Peter Coats provided Robert Rhodes James (a future Tory member of parliament) with a much-shortened transcript. However, it appears to have been Rhodes James’s own decision to undertake further expurgations, disguising Channon’s bisexuality, when he published the original edition in 1967.Footnote ⁷⁷

Reviewing the first volume of Simon Heffer’s new edition of Channon’s diary in 2021, Richard Davenport-Hines wrote: ‘To view the diaries as political history is to mistake them entirely. Political historians may be dismayed by the hectic partygoing and intolerant of the callous, reactionary frivolity of Channon’s parliamentary judgements. But the diaries are a piece of literary craft.’Footnote ⁷⁸ Though insightful about the genre aspirations of Channon (who had known Proust), Davenport-Hines made an error when he implied that normal political diaries are not literary. Beatrice Webb – not actually a politician but a social reformer with deep political connections – did much to cement the diary as a twentieth-century politico-literary genre. As Helen McCarthy shows in her contribution to this volume, Webb in her youth undertook a literary self-fashioning, allowing her private passions to shine through in her diary while cultivating an external image as the emotionless but efficient author of arid social-scientific texts. Webb’s reworking of her diary – once dismissed by her husband Sidney as the ‘scribblings of a woman’ – caused her ‘an agony of mind’ as she prepared her memoir of her early life for publication.Footnote ⁷⁹ Published as My Apprenticeship (1926), this may have been ‘an autobiography with the love affairs left out’, but it was also one with the literary artifice left in.Footnote ⁸⁰

‘One golden rule, if you want to be remembered, is to keep a diary’, Pimlott advised.Footnote ⁸¹ But, as he himself knew, not all diaries are equal. Creating a readable one is a skill that needs to be worked at. Dalton started his during World War I as a dry record of ordinary events. It took time for it to develop into a vehicle for commentary, thought, and planning.Footnote ⁸² In line with Pimlott’s dictum, a range of relatively minor figures (as well as bystanders or observers from outside the sphere of formal politics) succeeded in writing themselves into history. This was partly through the systematic recording of events, partly through literary skill, and partly through the relevant diaries being published.

Channon – a figure of little political consequence but of great observational power – is an obvious example. The diplomat Harold Nicolson, who served for ten years as a National Labour MP, was of somewhat greater significance. But, his colourful marriage to the author Vita Sackville-West notwithstanding, he would likely not feature so often in the indexes of historical works were it not for the published volumes of his diaries and letters.Footnote ⁸³ Reading them offered the chance to escape into another milieu.Footnote ⁸⁴ Similarly, Alan Clark would be little better remembered than the average Thatcher minister had he not published his salacious diaries.Footnote ⁸⁵ As well as providing material for historians, Clark appealed to ordinary readers through his apparent breach of genre conventions. ‘He is amusing – bitingly cynical & doesn’t spare himself’, noted one Mass Observer. ‘He sounds a clever amusing swine. Rather refreshing after all the political memoirs spilling the beans on colleagues.’Footnote ⁸⁶ A 1996 Observer article suggested that publishers were ‘beginning to consider the political memoir dead as a genre unless written with the ribald gusto of an Alan Clark’.Footnote ⁸⁷

But even plain accounts can be deceptive in their simplicity. The diary of the Edwardian Liberal minister J. A. Pease was, as its editors note, ‘primarily a record of things heard, seen, and done in Parliament and 10 Downing Street’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Family and constituency issues were not prioritised in Pease’s writing, though this did not necessarily mean that they were unimportant to him. The diary served as an aide memoire – that is to say, as a practical tool – and as such was not a complete description of political or personal life. Historians are frequently conscious of the potential pitfalls caused by diarists’ choices of focus – but their interpretations are inevitably shaped by those choices all the same.

Authors and editors often faced tough choices when deciding what material to include in published editions. Richard Crossman, Barbara Castle, and Tony Benn were among the diarists who produced far more text than could feasibly be included even in multi-volume books. Making selections involved judgement calls about what was important, relevant, and interesting. This could, of course, be influenced by hindsight. Ruth Winstone, editor of Benn’s diaries (while he was still alive), recalled:

It is always necessary to ask how closely published diaries follow the original texts. Crossman found that the transcript of his original tapes was ‘hardly readable’. He ‘decided therefore to re-dictate this whole first transcript in plain intelligible English’, recruiting Janet Morgan of Nuffield College to make sure ‘that the second version was faithful to the first’.Footnote ⁹⁰ After Crossman’s death, Morgan edited the remaining volumes. In her introduction to the third of these, she noted that she had ‘completed sentences, disentangled metaphors and corrected the grammar …. Of course in some places major textual surgery has been essential’.Footnote ⁹¹ It might be an exaggeration to say that published diaries are mere literary confections, but an editor may well be concerned to create a coherent, or even exciting, narrative from a mass of sometimes inchoate material.

This may be balanced, however, with the intent to educate the reader. Castle’s publisher, working on her diary for 1966, advised: ‘At this stage of the narrative it seems to me important to keep down the length of individual entries to achieve a sense of pace in the run up to the election. At the same time it is very interesting to show how government work continues inexorably even days from the announcement of an election.’Footnote ⁹² On a few occasions, the sheer readability of certain diaries has created a market for follow-up volumes written after the authors have left active political life. Politics thus blurs into entertainment – as perhaps it always has. In the preface to his post-parliamentary diary, the former Labour MP Chris Mullin notes wryly that ‘the political meeting is not dead. It has simply transferred to the literary festival’.Footnote ⁹³

What, then, is the state of British PLW in the mid-2020s? Conventional biography, arguably, has developed into a zombie genre. Many political lives are still published, yet, with some partial exceptions such as Tom Baldwin’s biography of Keir Starmer, they do little to shape the reputations of their subjects or the contours of historical debate.Footnote ⁹⁴ Books such as Anthony Seldon’s Truss At 10, which are focused on an individual yet eschew a cradle-to-grave approach, seem more pertinent to the national conversation.Footnote ⁹⁵ Autobiographies, for their part, have long suffered an image problem. Some authors sought to battle this, consciously presenting their own books as different from ‘traditional’ or ‘conventional’ political memoirs.Footnote ⁹⁶ Publicity for Boris Johnson’s Unleashed claimed that it shattered the mould of the modern prime ministerial memoir.Footnote ⁹⁷ Breaking with genre conventions is thus presented as a mark of authenticity.

Diaries have retained more vitality and relevance, albeit partly through defining themselves in relation to the idea that tedious, score-settling accounts are the autobiographical norm. The jacket copy of Norman Fowler’s 2023 volume, covering his years as a minister under Thatcher and Major emphasises: ‘These are not the diaries of an ex-minister seeking to justify their own record.’Footnote ⁹⁸ Authors can aspire to transcend genre and join the ‘pantheon of truly great diarists’ that includes Chips Channon and Alan Clark.Footnote ⁹⁹ Sasha Swire recalled in the preface to the paperback of her Diary of an MP’s Wife: ‘I read the edited proofs [of the hardback] during the first national lockdown [in] March 2020, and felt rather like Chips Channon re-reading his own diary, “frequently horrified by the scandalous tone it has”.’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Clearly, an element of pride accompanied the horror.

Herein lies a paradox. The works that are often viewed as the ‘best’ examples of PLW are those which are seen to be, in some way, distanced from conventional political concerns; that is, they breach expected genre conventions by being personal, confessional, and apparently careless of reputation. Yet such books themselves reinforce a view of politics which is Westminster-centred and which reflects, to a great extent, the perspectives of a small number of privileged white men. Arguably, it also reinforces the ‘two-party politics’ assumptions of Westminster and mainstream political journalism even when, as today, that model corresponds poorly to reality. Like any other books, works in the PLW genre are produced not by lone auteurs, but by networks of authors, editors, agents, publishers, printers, and so forth, as well as being influenced (often) by the rules of official secrecy. Similarly, the shifting genre conventions of PLW have been shaped collectively, and through creative tension: by politicians, civil servants, journalists, reviewers, the publishing industry, and the expectations of ordinary readers. And these genre conventions have generally reflected and reinforced a rather narrow, elite perception of what politics is, albeit one that includes a significant element of disenchantment.