Politics: A Survivor's Guide: A Waterstones best Politics book of 2023

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The ideological core of British Conservatism now shades into conspiracy theory – joining the dots between disparate agents of liberal and leftwing opinion in politics, media, culture and academia to make a pattern of counter-revolutionary obstruction. That appeal for nuance pervades this beautifully written, persuasive plea to bridge our political divides. It is also a warning of the dangers if we don’t. There is a normal tension between easy promises made at election time and their difficult subsequent realisation by the winning side. Democracy is supposed to manage that tension across an electoral cycle. In theory, there is a period between ballots where governments make hard choices, inflict disappointments and broker compromises. Then they return to the country after four or five years to ask whether the trade-off has been worth it. Anger is not inherently toxic to democracy. It can be the antidote to apathy, but it has to be the spur to something else. It has to lead somewhere that isn’t just more anger. “Anger is to make you effective,” Philip Roth once wrote. “That’s its survival function. That’s why it’s given to you. If it makes you ineffective, drop it like a hot potato.” Scientifically demonstrable facts have not been eliminated from public life, as the common “post-truth” lament would imply. Covid was killing people whether they believed in it or not. Pandemic policy in Britain might not have been a prompt or exact enactment of what government scientists recommended, but nor did it go chasing after bizarre superstitions.

And then of course there is the other side of the political spectrum, with which Behr was more politically aligned until Corbyn’s leadership of Labour. Politics, A Survivor’s Guide,' is all about the infuriating toxicity of politics, how it got that way and how to resist the slide into cynicism and pessimism that are so corrosive of democracy. It’s about the challenge of staying engaged without getting enraged; the need to empathise with people whose views we cannot share and how that is different to appeasement of politics we believe to be dangerous. At a special event, live in London and via the livestream, Rafael Behr will discuss his new book, Politics: A Survivor's Guide. Rafael Behr talks to Rob Hutton, parliamentary sketch writer at the Critic, about the uneasy relationship between Westminster lobby journalists and MPs. It is distressingly rare to find convincing defences of liberal democracy against the twin challenges of populism and nationalism. Rafael Behr does the job perfectly. -- John Peet, Political and Brexit Editor, The EconomistThat implausible configuration of events gets a conspiratorial twist from the recruitment of Sue Gray, the former senior cabinet office official who investigated Partygate, to be Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. The move was not unprecedented, but hardly an advertisement for civil service impartiality.

In Politics: A Survivor’s Guide, the award-winning Guardian writer Rafael Behr takes us on a personal and global journey, drawing on insights from his three decades as a journalist to produce a passionate guide to the landscape of the permacrisis. Join him in conversation with writer and broadcaster David Aaronovitch about why our politics is so divided, how it damages our democracy, and how we stay engaged without despairing or losing hope. The concept of an “attention economy” was coined before the internet wrote it into the business model of a multi-trillion-dollar industry. It was first theorised in the 1970s by computer scientist and psychologist (and Nobel laureate) Herbert A Simon. As he put it: We live in an age of fury and confusion. A new crisis erupts before the last one has finished: financial crisis, Brexit, pandemic, war in Ukraine, inflation, strikes. Prime Ministers come and go but politics stays divided and toxic. But does a journalist's 'insider status' cloud their judgement when working out how to write about political stories or policy ssues, or whether to cover them at all?It is a cumbersome way to rig a poll. Each impersonation alters the outcome by just one vote. To swing the result, a cheating campaign would need an army of serial liars, probably with multiple disguises. Behr is a brilliant stylist whose writing is full of quotable sentences and sharp analogies. * Guardian * How can we still care about politics without being driven to despair or madness? This is an urgent question for citizens everywhere and Rafael Behr answers it with both passion and panache in this wonderfully engaging book. Written with all the verve and wit that make Behr one of the great stylists of contemporary journalism, this