MPs vote Hague No 1 (but not you, William)

Published on Sunday 10 August 2008 22:28

IT IS a tale of sexual skulduggery in Downing Street, of decades of deception with a younger lover – and of a prime minister brought down by a cash-for-honours scandal.

As such, it is perhaps no surprise Ffion Hague's "testosterone-driven melodrama" about the life of David Lloyd George is the joint favourite summer read of MPs.

Mrs Hague, the wife of former Tory leader William, tells how the man who was Liberal prime minister from 1916 to 1922 kept secret his 30-year affair with Frances Stevenson.

One reviewer described the book, Lloyd George And His Women, as the "lamentable story of a serial adulterer", a man who, until his dying day at the age of 82, needed women to tie his shoelaces or do up his buttons and who spent his life "as helpless in the grip of his sex drive as of his political ambitions".

Mrs Hague shares joint first place in the MPs' book list with A Thousand Splendid Suns, the Afghani novelist Khaled Hosseini's follow-up to best-seller The Kite Runner. Again set in Afghanistan, this tells of the contrasting lives of two women growing up through the Soviet invasion and the brutality and oppression of the Mujahideen and Taleban regimes. This was the favourite among Labour MPs, confirming their preference for fiction over a Tory love of biographies.

Mrs Hague is joined near the top of the list by her husband. His biography of anti-slave trade campaigner William Wilberforce is joint third, while his earlier biography of William Pitt the Younger is fifth.

Equal third place is claimed by Sebastian Faulks' addition to the canon of James Bond spy novels, Devil May Care. Perhaps proving the accuracy of the list, even the Tory leader, David Cameron, has been spied reading Faulks' take on Ian Fleming's legendary secret agent.

Ian Rankin, who devised the Rebus detective books that are said to be a favourite of Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, was the most popular novelist among Labour MPs.

Predictably, the list, compiled by Waterstone's after a poll of 150 MPs, was dominated by political memoirs. The Blair Years, by Alastair Campbell, the former No 10 spin doctor; Pulling No Punches by John Prescott, the former deputy PM, and An Utterly Impartial History of Britain by the former Labour candidate John O'Farrell are all mentioned frequently.

Also present are two books by Barack Obama, the Democrat candidate for the US presidency. Dreams From My Father tells of his childhood, while The Audacity of Hope sets out his political agenda for the future.

Randall Stevenson, professor of 20th-century literature at Edinburgh University, was disappointed that the list was so dominated by biographies. He told The Scotsman: "I would have thought if they really wanted to get away from it, they wouldn't be reading history or biographies. I think they would gain as much from reading imaginative fiction or historical fiction."

Two unnamed Tory MPs told researchers they wouldn't be taking any books on holiday as they would spend the time off writing their own books. Two others replied: "What holiday?"

TOP TEN

1 The Pain and the Privilege: The Women in Lloyd George's Life

Ffion Hague

= A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini

3 William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner

William Hague

= Devil May Care

Sebastian Faulks

5 William Pitt the Younger

William Hague

= The Audacity of Hope

Barack Obama

= Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Barack Obama

= The Blair Years

Alastair Campbell

= The Ghost

Robert Harris

= My Story: Pulling No Punches

John Prescott

= Poems by RS Thomas

= An Utterly Impartial History of Britain

John O'Farrell

= The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience

Rob Hopkins