32 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is the satirist Craig Brown, talking about his brilliant new book A Voyage Round the Queen. Craig tells me what made him think there was something new to say about Elizabeth II, how he found himself in possession of the only scoop of his career and about his mortifying encounter with Her Maj.
Seven hundred pages of memoir is stretching it a bit even for an ex-inhabitant of No. 10 with David Cameron’s need for self-justification. Halfway through For the Record I was tempted to skip a chapter or two, but then I encountered a passage that made the slog worthwhile. Talking about his relationship with the Queen, her 12th prime minister notes two essentials in preparing for the weekly audience. First check the BBC news headlines because she is always formidably well informed. Second get up to speed on what is happening in the horse-racing world. (He used to check with his bloodstock agent friend Tom Goff whether one of her horses
