Football, faith and Fabianism: what books by the new frontbenchers tell us about the way Labour will govern

Ed Miliband’s ideas are more radical than his party’s; Emily Thornberry is alarmed by Trump; Rachel Reeves has an unlikely role model. What else do the new cabinet’s tomes reveal?

When the Conservatives started to shapeshift into their current ethno-nationalist, gerontophilic, free-market-fundamentalist form, we had to learn our way around its new disciples, and did so reading Britannia Unchained. We were right to, because that book is crazy, and Liz Truss – well, we all remember Liz Truss.

There is no like-for-like bible of Labour frontbench thought, but many members of the new cabinet have committed their views to paper. Only a couple of these books operate as blueprints for a policy environment (Ed Miliband’s Go Big, Lisa Nandy’s All In; Emily Thornberry’s pamphlet The Age of Trump); others are biographies (Nick Thomas-Symonds’s Harold Wilson) and autobiographies (Wes Streeting’s One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up); cultural theory (David Lammy’s Tribes); feminist-leaning listicles (Yvette Cooper’s She Speaks, Rachel Reeves’s The Women Who Made Modern Economics), and miscellany (Ian Murray’s This Is Our Story).

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