How Much Do 'Tell All' Political Thrillers Really Tell Us?

With the publication of Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff has achieved a state of journalistic career nirvana beyond the wildest private dreams of even the most ruthlessly ambitious broadsheet intern. It's a piece of rare publishing magic: a book so immediately famous in pre-publication that the entire world knew the main plot points before a single punter had even read it. Donald Trump: walking cataclysm-in-waiting, publishing house panacea made flesh.

At this point, there can’t be a single watercooler in the country that hasn’t witnessed titillated mewings about its contents. Sure, it’s best to couch them in tones of appalled sobriety. Steve Bannon in the wilderness waving thick chipolata fingers and screaming treason. Pissgate, Pussygate and sterilised Maccy D's Double Cheese Burgers by the jet load. The paranoid 25 stone baby, frightened at its own shadow. A hideous, particularly American tableau of accumulated horrors in both major and minor keys.

Yet, while the bombast of the content might have been turned up to match the tenor of the incumbent, Fire and Fury doesn’t exactly mark a departure or witness the birth of a new, shocking political sub-genre. Indeed, tell-all insider dispatches from the heart of government are something akin to political publishing gold dust, guaranteed a snug perch on bestseller lists from Wisconsin to Wakefield. Who doesn’t love to read tales of government dysfunction, sleaze or venality? Of titanically petty fallings-out and long-nursed personal grievances.

Who couldn’t, for example, read with delight Andrew Rawnsley’s novel-paced evisceration of the New Labour fag-end days, 2010’s The End of the Party, or be unmoved by the sheer bitchiness on offer. Of Blair "writing emotional blank cheques" to Brown and George W Bush. Or of the revelation that Peter Mandelson never seems to break character as the Middlesex Richard III ("I love you, but I’ll break you! If you do that, I can destroy you!").

Or, in more noble moods, the outlines of late-night struggles and earnest attempts at reform to a corrupt, blighted system, as with James Mann’s The Obamians, a bracingly "gee wizz, boy isn’t this kinda like the West Wing" rattle through the foreign policy agenda of the Obama administration. In short, it’s a corner which holds something for a reader of any persuasion from either side of the Atlantic, left, right, centre or Monster Raving Loony, alike.

What’s more, you can actually feel good reading it. This isn’t just idle gossip and the settling of poisonous scores by baffled junior ministers or Chiefs of Staff booted into the long grass (or back to Breibart, in the case of Steve Bannon). This is a peek behind the fraying curtain, a hand-in-hand tour down the corridors of power.

The barriers of entry for the writer involved tend to be both fairly achievable and utterly remote. First, enough baseline talent to be able to transform the vast hours of observed boredom into breezy airport newsagent spy thriller prose. Then, some sort of "in" to the government in question. For Rawnsley, this was attained via a distinguished career as a somewhat sympathetic political journalist. For Wolff, decades of political and cultural reportage combined with once having written a vaguely friendly Trump profile and saying that his hotels were quite nice, actually. Crucially, they have to possess a gift for simply hanging about. Of sitting in the right canteen at the exact right moment that some shell-shocked staffer stumbles in with a wobbly lip and a grievance to screech. Of listening while others babble – a talent as rare in political journalism as it is in life itself.

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There's also an argument to be made that reading these political equivalents of the Mean Girls burn book is almost a civic duty, a true guide to the vanities, chaos and the very strong, stable genius of the burbling – at best – mediocrities who govern us. And, as in the case of Wolff on Trump, their genuine competence and willing to even do the job itself. And this argument is correct, in its own small way: it is important to know the machinations of the powerful and their disasters of morality or diet.

But it takes a neck of brass to pretend these are the main motives in tearing through the pages of these political true-crimes. Sure, the minutiae of the PR middle managers' coup d'etat of the Tories does make for mildly diverting reading in Call Me Dave. But would you really bother reading it without the knowledge you were eventually going to reach the section about Davey allegedly fucking a pig? Doubt it.

As much as we might like to believe in the self-improving powers of such books, and as profound and necessary as we like to believe their insights to be, it’s a mistake to value them too highly above their first sugar rush highs. As Trump himself would enthusiastically attest, junk food is fine, in moderation. And to call these kind of books journalistic junk food isn’t a slur; they're full of quick, astonishment-filled dopamine hits that spark the same parts of the brain that make you stop and leer at a National Enquirer headline about Lindsay Lohan being abducted by aliens. And that’s fine. But man can’t live on Big Macs alone.

@DrLimes99