Books at bedtime

The last thing Winston Churchill (or Ramsay MacDonald, for that matter) would have thought of discussing before taking power as prime minister was the kind of books they read to their children, or took to bed with them after a hard night’s slog wading through government papers. But such are the times we now live in that Gordon Brown felt compelled this week to disclose to Mariella Frostrup that his favourite children’s book was an illustrated fable by Julia Donaldson. (For the uninitiated she writes books like The Snail and the Whale and The Gruffalo, whose square-jawed visage has already become so familiar to families with young children.)

Frostrup interviewed our new PM for Open Book (Radio Four, Sunday), asking him to choose five of his favourite books. Only two of these were revealed to the press in advance in an odd reflection of BBC (or Brownite) sensitivity — Donaldson’s, and a novel by the Scottish writer William McIlvanney in which the hero, a committed socialist, struggles against the tide of economic and familial realities to put into practice his ideas.