Tim Shipman ‘Out’ Review - Part One
Namier, he ain't
Tim Shipman considers himself a writer of political chronicles as opposed to a historian attempting to contextualise events and draw out deeper themes and analyses thereof. To that end, he can consider ‘Out’, the fourth and final entry of his ‘Brexit Quartet’, to be a measured triumph. This is a book about people, not ideas, and Shipman has clearly spent thousands of hours reading and tens of thousands of pounds on boozy lunches to create a comprehensive and methodical reference point for future historians interested in this period of British politics.
He is not blessed with an analytical mind but his affability and ‘time working the beat’ means he has access to people I do not have, and his revelations about Cummings’s role in the Partygate are an invaluable contribution to one of own strands of thinking on the man in question - more dark comms than dark data. The work has sharpened my understanding of the period and the exercise of reading it has given me many lines of new analysis to pursue, and for that I am grateful.
Where Shipman fails to stick to this guiding principle, writing about people and not ideas, is where the book begins faltering; as his hackneyed centre-right tropes bleed through to the page. The reader is then immediately transferred away from the story and back to ‘Choppers and Shippers’ multiverse, read a few choice extracts below. First we have the boilerplate Tory genuflection towards Diversity in the Cabinet.
Which is only made more unpleasant by what I believe may be plagiarism from Fraser Nelson below:
I wonder if this sort of behaviour causes Fraser Nelson the same fury that I feel towards the sodden gobshites who steal from me and term it ‘poasting-to-policy’ as if they are doing me a favour? The man is likely too handsome and happy to concern himself with such matters, his mind swimming in a soup of ‘Bright-Green Eco Optimism’ and the need to give benefits cheats the dignity of full-time work, for their own good. The below section I will give full credit to Shipman to, as it reduced me to doubling over with laughter.
You can see why he’d rather not talk about ideas! The prose elsewhere is repetitive but mostly serviceable. At each and every stage of the Brexit negotiations Barnier and Frost are constantly besieged by ‘stale sandwiches’ on the verge of going ‘absolutely nuclear’. I did spot one typographical error where Shipman confuses the ECHR with the EHRC.
An excusable mistake to make, perhaps, but what alarmed me more were the sections where it seems Shipman hasn’t actually been keeping up with the news. Take the below as an example.
I suspect even people who had kept up with events in Ukraine by watching broadcast media would know that both the ‘Snake Island’ and ‘I need ammunition’ story have been comprehensively debunked, and indeed, were comprehensively debunked by the point where this story ends at the time of the 2024 General Election. Worse, by far, is Shippers undying resolve to interpret the dangers of the Astra Zeneca vaccine through the lens of Great British boosterism.
This glaring error is almost incomprehensible. It’s as if Shipman wrote this week by week as it way actually happening and did not think to go back and edit what was already there. That people like Shipman engaged in this warped spasm of patriotism, likely encouraging hundreds of thousands of people to take an unsafe vaccine despite medical experts in other countries raising alarm bells, should be a point of professional shame. Lives were permanently ruined in that period. 23 year olds had brain haemorrhages and then died. In a darkly hilarious fashion, we see how Shippers exculpates himself of this moral stain on his conscience, one which would probably haunt me to my grave - he doesn’t just not think about it, he doesn’t even know about it!