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While the best political diarists reveal their vulnerability and ‘capture how it felt in the heat of the moment, however mortifying it might be to read in retrospect,’ wrote, former Health Secretary Matt Hancock ‘never actually kept a diary but hasn't let that stop him publishing one’. The result is ‘a book concocted after the event (but before the public inquiry) with the help of journalist Isabel Oakeshott from a mishmash of old papers, notes and emoji-laden WhatsApps. And with the selective benefit of hindsight, what the former health secretary mainly sees is – surprise! – all the times he was brilliantly prescient, and all the times his Downing Street nemesis Dominic Cummings wasn't’.
