EXCL: MPs swot up on Donald Trump gossip book ahead of UK visit
3 min read
A searing account of the Donald Trump White House dismissed as “phony” by the US President himself has topped the list of books most borrowed by MPs this year, PoliticsHome can reveal.
Michael Woolf’s ‘Fire and Fury: Inside The Trump White House’ was published in February, promising a no-holds-barred account of life in the Oval Office.
The book, which alleges that the US commander-in-chief did not want to win the 2016 election and regularly "eats cheeseburgers in bed while watching three TVs at once", was subject to legal action by the White House, which attempted to block its publication. Mr Trump branded it a "phony book" packed with "lies, misrepresentations and sources that don't exist".
Figures released to PoliticsHome under a Freedom of Information request show that the gossipy tome has been the most-borrowed book from the House of Commons library so far this year.
'Fire & Fury' - which was borrowed nine times in just four months - was taken out by MPs ahead of a controversial July visit to the UK by the firebrand Republican president, and dominates a top five list otherwise made up of more conventional books on parliamentary rules.
Also making the cut at numbers two, three and four respectively are a 'Handbook of House of Commons procedure’ published by PoliticsHome’s parent company Dods and two editions of ‘How Parliament works’ by former Commons clerk Lord Lisvane. The top five is rounded out by ‘Confessions of a recovering MP’ by Nick de Bois, the former Conservative MP for Enfield north who lost his seat to Labour in 2015.
Two insider accounts of the tumultuous 2017 UK election that cost Theresa May her Commons majority also make the top 20, with Sunday Times’ political editor Tim Shipman’s ‘Fall Out’ and ‘Betting The House’ by Politico's chief UK correspondent Tom McTague and Bloomberg's Tim Ross both getting three loans each in the first quarter of the year.
Separate figures released under FOI meanwhile show that more than £350-worth of books vanished from the Commons library between April 2017 and March 2018.
The most valuable book that was not returned and is now presumed lost was a hardback copy of ‘Labour’s thinkers: the intellectual roots of Labour from Tawney to Gordon Brown’, estimated to be worth £90. Meanwhile a copy of ‘Redbrick’, described as a ‘social and architectural history of Britain's civic universities’ also went wandering, at an estimated cost of £75 to the taxpayer-funded library.
The total estimated value of books that did not get returned over the past 12 months was £368.
PoliticsHome can also reveal that several books borrowed from the Commons library over the period are now months overdue.
A book on Gloucestershire and one on the celebrated welfare state founder William Beveridge were supposed to have been handed back on August 22 last year but have not been renewed. Meanwhile a guide to the Conservative 1922 backbench committee has been overdue since last September.
PoliticsHome Newsletters
PoliticsHome provides the most comprehensive coverage of UK politics anywhere on the web, offering high quality original reporting and analysis: Subscribe
