Beware the politician's summer reading "recommendations"... | thearticle

Mark Zuckerberg, the self-confessed admirer of the first Roman Emperor, Augustus, has yet another historical role model. When asked by NBC to recommend a book for summer reading, Zuckerberg

suggested _The Last Days of Night_ by Graham Moore. Ostensibly, the book is a historical thriller about the competition between Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla to bring

electricity to the US and beyond. But journalists were quick to notice the similarities between the Edison story and the Zuckerberg story. As David McCabe, Technology Reporter at Axios, put

it: “Mark Zuckerberg says he’s reading a novel about a winner-take-all battle for control of core technological infrastructure, in which one of the players is a talented investor closely

associated with a town called Menlo Park.” In other words, both Edison and Zuckerberg sought to monopolise new forms of technology, and Menlo Park is not only where Edison set up shop, but

where Facebook’s headquarters are too. This habit of using a bookshelf as a veiled self-portrait will be all too familiar to political observers in the UK. Take Robert Caro’s multi-volume

biography of US President Lyndon Johnson, which many a British politician have swooned over. Johnson’s ‘Means of Ascent’ from Texan poverty to Leader of the Free World was thanks to a

mixture of hard work and plain old intimidation. For his admirers, he is perhaps the ultimate political antihero: ruthless, unpopular, but also a bringer of change, particularly on civil

rights. Indeed, Michael Gove has talked of his “tragic greatness”. He’s not the only one. Gordon Brown called the Caro books “one of the great political biographies”. George Osborne called

them “the greatest books about politics I’ve ever come across” and, when in office, he invited Caro to Downing Street to discuss them. John Bercow, when asked by _Prospect_ magazine which

book he wished he had written, responded with Caro’s biography. Gove interviewed Caro in 2012 and allegedly read over 1,000 pages of the biography, while his wife was in labour. Boris

Johnson has not publicised himself as a Caro aficionado, but he has invoked 1960s America – the decade in which LBJ was president – as a model for Boris Britain. More importantly, Grant

Shapps, who masterminded Boris’s victory in the first stage of the Tory leadership contest using Excel pivot tables, has read the Caro books and is clearly a keen observer of LBJ’s “first

rule of politics”: be able to count. Reportedly, Shapps handed Boris an envelope containing a spot-on prediction of the number of votes he would receive from Tory MPs before one of the

ballots. In any case, Boris has his own LBJ: the Ancient Greek statesman Pericles, a bust of whom sits on his Downing Street desk, and whose ‘Golden Age’ he invoked in his first prime

ministerial address in the House of Commons. Likewise, one of the revelations from the recent BBC documentary about Margaret Thatcher was that she kept a copy of the poem _No Enemies_ by

Charles Mackay in her personal scrapbook. In the poem, the poet advises the reader to make foes in life: “if you have none, small is the work that you have done”. But it’s not just

politicians who use history and literature for their own ends. Before becoming the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle wrote a blog and recommended books for summer reading, one of which was

_Rita Moreno: A Memoir_, about a Hollywood star who came from nowhere. Sound familiar? And just look at how the disgraced actor Kevin Spacey resurfaced last week: by publicly reciting the

poem _The Boxer_ by Gabriele Tinti. Lines such as “the more you’re wounded the greater you are” and “I lit up the darkness, collected insults, compelled applause” could have been written

about Spacey. Perhaps that’s why he recited them. Entrepreneurs, actors, politicians – it seems that any influential figure today feels compelled to validate their reputation through

validating that of another historical figure. It’s the modern equivalent of the rulers of old posing for a portrait or sculpture with strategically placed items – what art historians call

‘attributes’. Just think of when Dominic Raab gave a television interview with several books positioned on the windowsill behind him, rather than on a bookshelf. Donald Trump has received

much criticism from the metropolitan elites for his disregard for books, The Atlantic dubbed him ‘The President Who Doesn’t Read’. Whether or not this is the case (he certainly promotes

pro-Trump studies on Twitter), there is, nonetheless, something refreshing about his openly self-interested use of books. It’s the powerful figures who do so cryptically – and just as

egotistically – that should make us wary.