by Joe Pike (Biteback, £12.99)
As the “in” and “out” campaigns square up ahead of Britain’s forthcoming EU membership referendum, strategists on both sides could do worse than read Joe Pike’s adrenaline-fuelled, blood and guts account of the run-up to the vote on Scottish independence and its aftermath.
“Shit just got real,” one Better Together staffer says to a colleague early in the book, as they watch the signing of the 2012 Edinburgh Agreement. From then on, the pace doesn’t let up, and Pike’s enviable access to the “no” campaign’s key operators keeps us in the thick of it.
It’s often Pike’s portraits of behind the scenes figures that are most interesting—from Paul Sinclair, the “bullish, aggressive” Scottish Labour Director of Communications, whose Alex Salmond impression helped Alistair Darling rehearse a TV debate, to John McTernan, who is said to have kept pictures of Chelsea players celebrating goals, with Tony Blair’s head Photoshopped on to them.
Pike, a political journalist at Holyrood, has a parliamentary reporter’s sometimes tedious obsession with every special advisor and bag carrier to cross the campaign threshold. But on the whole he is careful to point to the significance of each encounter, and the book’s first, pre-referendum, section is especially adept at leading you from TV green room to chauffeured car without ever losing sight of the looming destination.
Indeed, the book begins with a glimpse of the campaign’s final weeks. “This was one of those rare moments… when the UK political establishment was caught utterly by surprise,” writes Pike. Those rooting for David Cameron’s EU membership renegotiation had better take note, lest it happen again.
As the “in” and “out” campaigns square up ahead of Britain’s forthcoming EU membership referendum, strategists on both sides could do worse than read Joe Pike’s adrenaline-fuelled, blood and guts account of the run-up to the vote on Scottish independence and its aftermath.
“Shit just got real,” one Better Together staffer says to a colleague early in the book, as they watch the signing of the 2012 Edinburgh Agreement. From then on, the pace doesn’t let up, and Pike’s enviable access to the “no” campaign’s key operators keeps us in the thick of it.
It’s often Pike’s portraits of behind the scenes figures that are most interesting—from Paul Sinclair, the “bullish, aggressive” Scottish Labour Director of Communications, whose Alex Salmond impression helped Alistair Darling rehearse a TV debate, to John McTernan, who is said to have kept pictures of Chelsea players celebrating goals, with Tony Blair’s head Photoshopped on to them.
Pike, a political journalist at Holyrood, has a parliamentary reporter’s sometimes tedious obsession with every special advisor and bag carrier to cross the campaign threshold. But on the whole he is careful to point to the significance of each encounter, and the book’s first, pre-referendum, section is especially adept at leading you from TV green room to chauffeured car without ever losing sight of the looming destination.
Indeed, the book begins with a glimpse of the campaign’s final weeks. “This was one of those rare moments… when the UK political establishment was caught utterly by surprise,” writes Pike. Those rooting for David Cameron’s EU membership renegotiation had better take note, lest it happen again.
