Assembled after the fact, these ‘diaries’ strain the usual definition – and the patience of those wanting a fuller account of government mistakes
If you want to get under the skin of politics, nothing beats a good diary.
And what distinguishes the best – from Alan Clark and Tony Benn to Alastair Campbell and more recently Sasha Swire – is the willingness to be vulnerable. A diarist’s job is to capture how it felt in the heat of the moment, however mortifying it might be to read in retrospect. Everything else is just publicity. Or in the case of Matt Hancock, who never actually kept a diary but hasn’t let that stop him publishing one, a book concocted after the event (but before the public inquiry) with the help of journalist Isabel Oakeshott from a mishmash of old papers, notes and emoji-laden WhatsApps. And with the selective benefit of hindsight, what the former health secretary mainly sees is – surprise! – all the times he was brilliantly prescient, and all the times his Downing Street nemesis Dominic Cummings wasn’t. If you couldn’t bear watching him on I’m a Celebrity, I’m afraid this book may go down like a plate of sheep’s unmentionables.
