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sfian's review
dark
funny
informative
medium-paced
5.0
I'm not a massive non-fiction reader and, when it do, it's generally books related to my interests, not politics. Yet, having chuckled along with Jones' Week In Tory on Twitter (he's literally the only person I follow on there), I really, really wanted to read his first venture into proper publishing.
The good news about this book is that you don't have to read every page. Well, I suppose you don't HAVE to read every page of ANY book but, with this one, ignoring the dozen pages of the index and the few lines of biography, has an incredible twenty-four pages listing the people who supported it's publication through crowd-funding - there's no way I'd plough through that, even if my own name was there to be found. More importantly, there is over one hundred and thirty pages of what are effectively footnotes, listing sources for the countless items mentioned throughout the book. Honestly, these probably work better as, I assume, hyperlinks in the e-book edition.
But that still leaves over five hundred pages of sleaze, corruption, condemnation and idiocy from the first ten years of the current Tory leadership of this country. A leadership, by a party that is a sick joke, consisting of Ministers who are both out of touch and only looking out for themselves (and their friends and cronies) and who have, between them, brought this country nearly to its knees and made us a laughing stock. (And all this, quite frankly, before Liz Truss got more involved than she should ever have allowed to be...)
You can probably tell that I'm very much part of the target audience. I remember much of what is covered from when it happened. I probably tutted at each individual scandal at the time. Reading about them now, one after the other, piled up next to each other, made me angry, exasperated and sad. Sad that we have been played by these incompetents for so long.
If there is one thing wrong with the book it's that, despite the humour being present in Jones' inimitable writing style, it's somehow more diluted than in the Twitter posts. A few more laughs at the expense of Johnson and his chums might have cut through the anger slightly. Maybe that's the point, though...