Spin city

‘That terrible place known as Westminster’: many readers might well agree with this, the first mention of our political capital in a charter dated 735 AD. However, as Robert Shepherd, journalist and political biographer, explains in his new book, all is not what it seems. The charter is a fake, cooked up by a 12th-century abbot of Westminster to get one over on those pesky monks at rival St Albans. Westminster, Shepherd asserts, was from the first a city of spin and has remained so ever since (and ‘terrible’ meant awe-inspiringly sacred, not awful, by the way).

The boundaries of Shepherd’s ‘historic’ Westminster are tightly drawn. They stretch only as far as Trafalgar Square in the north to St John’s Smith Square in the south, and from the Thames embankment to St James’s Park. Splicing together histories, old and new, of the key institutions and their buildings — Parliament, Abbey, Downing Street and Whitehall — inside the square mile of the Westminster village, the author is inevitably drawn into recounting a full-scale political history of Britain in 43 bite-sized chapters: but one as seen from inside the stockade.