Lookalike, actor, comic and TV presenter, Browning is one of Cameron’s most successful lookalikes, earning up to £500 in a day to mimic the PM. His talents extend beyond that, though – he often gets work as Nick Clegg’s lookalike, too…

The restaurant

Nipa Thai

This spacious Thai restaurant is on the second floor of London’s grand Lancaster Hotel, with a vibrant view of Hyde Park’s Italian Gardens. What it lacks in atmosphere, it makes up for in flavour in its brand-new Khantok lunch menu.

The menu

Traditional Khantok box Chicken Thai green curry, minced prawn on crisp bread with cucumber relish, stir-fried mixed vegetables, steamed rice.

Vegetarian Khantok box Asian vegetable red curry, vegetable-filled spring rolls with plum sauce, stir-fried mixed vegetables, steamed rice.

We drank

A glass each of Merlot Veneto.     

We discussed

Realisation A woman I was living with once looked at the back of my head and said, “You look like David Cameron”. I then sent a picture to an agency, and they took me. That was about three or four years ago.

One-man coalition I’ve done Clegg nearly as much as I’ve done Cameron. What does that tell you about politicians these days? All identikit, all look and sound like each other, all went to the same schools. Says it all. I’m a one-man coalition, which is very disconcerting.

Dangerous occupation People shout at me – I’ve had, “Get us out of Europe”, “Don’t let any more immigrants in”, “What you gonna do about hoodies?” I live on a council estate myself and I daren’t put this [costume] on walking through there, I’d get mugged. Sometimes I feel vulnerable, a bit of a hate character, as Cameron – I can assess his popularity by being him for the day. During the election and the Olympics, it was “Oh great, chummy Dave”, but since then, it’s gone down.

Token gesture He learned the hand gestures at the Tony Blair School of Mime. There are the thumbs clasped, then forthright, earnest karate chops, gestures from the chest outwards, and the pressing down – making bread. The really difficult one is when he gets very serious; he tenses the top lip, and it can distort my speech when I’m trying to do his posh voice. The TV industry thinks that no one can get his voice right. It’s a bland, Etonian voice structured to be right down the middle, any strange inflections or characteristics ironed out.

Back to reality One of my stand-up comedy lines is, “Hi, my name’s Bentley, or, as some people say, the Transvestite David Cameron”, because I’ve got very long hair. My miracle hairdresser hides it all. Normally I look like a rock ‘n’ roller; I play in a band called Explode the TV.

Behind the façade Dressing up as someone takes you into the inner character. It makes me fully aware that he’s a human being. I’d love to meet him, but he’s stockier than me and I bet he could give me a good bunch of fives to the chin.

Power trip Once the costume’s on, it releases the ‘inner bastard’. I change; I want to push people out of the way. And I think, ‘Is this the spirit of Cameron?’ I don’t feel myself – I’m a gentle, leftish kind of person, a liberal, but in the costume, it’s ‘outta my way’.

Reluctant Tory I’m from Sheffield, so it’s not in my blood to vote Tory. I’d probably vote Green. I’m caught between saying what I want to and playing the part, but if it weren’t for Cameron I wouldn’t have this job. It’s a quirk of fate and I’ve turned it to my advantage. So, good on him, long may he reign.

Perfect for

Perched directly above Lancaster Gate tube, this is the ideal location for any hungry members of the Notting Hill set close by.

Not suitable for

Anyone who prefers a more characterful lunch venue – there’s an impersonal, hotel-dining feel about it.

The cost £9.95 per person.

Bentley Browning runs the Stand Up Comedy Novices and Public Speaking courses and workshops and is author of How To Find a Husband. Contact him on 07980 286 258; www.bentleybrowning.com; www.davidcameron-lookalike.tv

To book a Nipa Thai Khantok lunch, email dine@lancasterlondon.com. Available Tues–Fri from 12–2pm

TALK

Why did Britain give up its Empire?

Dr Sean Lang lectures on the decline of the British Empire. Examining the reasons behind the Empire’s fall after the Second World War, Lang asks whether the cause of the Empire’s retreating borders was the inevitable march of history, a triumph of terrorism or a graceful change of policy at the top. Lang is senior lecturer in history at Anglia Ruskin University, specialising in the history of the British Empire. His books include Nazi Foreign Policy 1933-1939 and Parliamentary Reform 1785-1928.

22 May, London Jewish Cultural Centre

DISPLAY

Diplomatic Dignitaries  

Hidden away in Room 23 at the National Portrait Gallery is a collection of comic caricatures of important diplomatic figures from overseas. On display are five original sketches by the artist Leslie Ward, including the first Chinese minister to Britain, Kuo Sung-t’ao, and the exiled Grand Vizier of Turkey, Midhat Pasha. The portraits were originally drawn for Vanity Fair, whose editor commissioned Ward to depict “the numerous foreign rulers, who have visited our islands from time to time”. Nicknamed ‘Spy’, Ward used covert study to acquire his likenesses. The exhibition also draws on Ward’s memoirs and Vanity Fair’s explanations of the significance of the foreign statesmen depicted.

Until 14 July, National Portrait Gallery

BOOKS

London Literature Festival

For over two weeks, the Southbank Centre will be hosting this literary festival of authors, speakers and poets. Readings by the ten authors nominated for this year’s Man Booker International Prize kick off the festival. Festival highlights include readings by Lionel Shriver, Audrey Niffenegger and James Salter. China Mieville and Rebecca Solnit also discuss their work. Philosopher AC Grayling lectures on humanism, while 40 leading women poets and performers read the whole of Sylvia Plath’s celebrated work Ariel. Celebrated biographer Claire Tomalin also presents five lectures, the first of which is on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

20 May-4 June, the Southbank Centre, London

Siegfried Sassoon’s The Flower-Show Match and Other Pieces is a lovely little collection of his essays, reflecting his journey from romantically patriotic support for the war in 1914 to his horror at the foolish realities of the trenches. His unsentimental nostalgia for the Old England of his youth shines throughout it.

Essays entitled The Tent on the Lawn and Sherston’s First Day Hunting jostle with The Raid and In Reserve. Yet Sassoon ends the collection with Edingthorpe Revisited and Sunday Morning Visitors, as if in justification.

Sassoon chose the name Sherston, a village in the heart of my constituency, for the autobiographical central character of his trilogy, Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston’s Progress. His love of the countryside, especially Wiltshire, endears him to me, as does his juxtaposition of the horrors of trench warfare with the peace of tea in the vicarage garden. We fight today to preserve all that’s good about England, yet does that justify the bodies carried through Royal Wootton Bassett only a few miles from Sassoon’s home? Statesmen today wrestle with that as much as they did then.

James Gray is the Conservative MP for North Wiltshire

And it is exactly this question, and what propaganda has come to be and mean to us, which defines the British Library’s new and stylishly techy exhibition that opens to the public today.

Intended to study the past 100 years of propaganda, with WW1 being the turning-point for the subject, the exhibition actually begins with ancient Greek coins and a 2-metre tall portrait of Napoleon – propaganda has always existed in substance, if not by name.

We learn it was the Catholic use of ‘propagate’ that brought the term into existence… and so begins a sinister spiral from evangelism into the excesses and often hilarities of political messaging.

Thankfully, the images so familiar to us we probably have them on a quaint mug somewhere – Uncle Sam pointing like an angrier, camper Lord Kitchener; Women of Britain Say ‘GO!,’ etc – in no way dominate this exhibition of over 200 propaganda pieces: posters, film footage, books, playing cards, boardgames, most of which have been sheltered all this time in the British Library itself.

(Flies and Disease; Kill the Fly and Save the Child, The Medical Officer. London, c.1920)

Striking is the scale and lurid grotesque of anti-semitic propaganda posters we are all too used to seeing faded and apologetic in history textbooks. The ominous power of propaganda screams like this throughout the dimly-lit exhibition, although the curators have been careful to approach it as a “neutral” process of communicating information. Also chilling are the Soviet Union’s vivid indictments of the US civil rights record during the Cold War years – the Statue of Liberty looms as a police watchtower (see below).

(Freedom American-style, 1971, B. Prorokov)

However, these banners of 20^th-century intimidation are only the noisy minority. They are set among all sorts of inventive propagandist artefacts and contraptions. For example, the pack of cards issued by US Intelligence Services to US-led soldiers in Iraq, helping them memorise members of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle and other figures. Then there is the feverish board game, With ‘Our Bobs' to Pretoria, the jolly aim of which is British domination of South Africa. I hate to think what kind of psychological warfare Snakes and Ladders is supposed to emulate.

The exhibition cleverly skips smoothly through loose themes like war, enemies within, public health – the apocalyptic anti-AIDS television campaigns are certainly worth watching – all the way to a giant, rather menacing Twitter aggregator, demonstrating how we are now the authors of our own propaganda, buying into an online narrative, but also creating a new narrative.

Maybe I’m a little stuck with Lord Kitchener and his moustachioed fellows of a bygone age, but I felt the Twitter focus at the end of the exhibition to be a bit bathetic, considering there are surely far subtler, more traditionally ‘propagandist’ methods of messaging we are all susceptible to online – so subtle perhaps that’s why they were missed…

Propaganda: Power and Persuasion is an exhibition at the British Library, 17 May - 17 September 2013, Adults £9 | Under 18s free | Concessions available

David Cameron rings the bell

As PM, it’s only natural that Cameron is photographed playing the largest instrument possible, even if it’s in Burma. As Boris often says to Cameron about his political career, “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”.

Ted Heath tickles the ivories

Prime minister ‘Teddy’ Heath owed his education to an organ scholarship at Balliol College and continued to perform and conduct throughout his political career. He later released a recording of Beethoven’s Triple Concerto – available on Amazon for £3.50. Kermit the frog, at least, is captivated.

Blair rocks out

While studying at Oxford, Tony Blair was the lead singer of a short-lived band called the Ugly Rumours. Another band member told the Guardian it “wasn’t exactly the Rolling Stones”. The erstwhile PM later found another place to hone his performance skills – the Labour Party…

Michael Bloomberg on trumpet

Choosing not to endorse a presidential candidate, Bloomberg opts to play his own tune – but who wouldn’t when they’re the seventh-richest person in the US? Here he plays, I Ain’t Got Nothing but the Blues (and $27bn) at the Department of Cultural Affairs Mayor’s Award.

Gordon Brown… with headphones

Brown doesn’t play an instrument, but that didn’t stop him engaging with London’s yoof in this well-staged photo. His relationship with Blair was illuminated by his appearance on Desert Island Discs when he chose Kirsty MacColl’s cover of Days: “You’re with me every single day, believe me...”

Bill Clinton on sax

Clinton had considered life as a saxophone player, but settled for politics. In Some Like it Hot, Sugar Kane Kowalczyk (Marilyn Monroe) said that you should do anything to avoid unfaithful sax players. Out of shot, Hillary beats off a pack of 22-year-old interns…

Boris Johnson on guitar

BoJo shows he’s right behind the prime minister when grasping a classic mayoral photo op busking here at London Bridge station. You can almost see the noble expression of restraint on his face as he resists playing Bob Marley hit I Shot the Sheriff...

Ed Balls on drums

This photo was taken when Balls was secretary of state for children, school and families, and had to frequently introduce himself as “Ed Balls” to groups of school kids. He insists he’s banging the drum for the other Ed...

Margaret Thatcher, forte on the piano

This photo was taken in 1970, the same year that Thatcher became education secretary. Here, she’s shown teaching her 17-year-old twins, Carol and Mark, to pursue wholesome extra-curricular activities. They followed that example all the way to the Australian rainforest and Equatorial Guinea…

Condoleezza Rice’s transporting piano

Rice is a classically trained pianist. She once said playing “is not relaxing… but it is transporting”. Her favourite opera, Modest Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, concerns Peter the Great’s attempts to impose Western institutions on Russia. Lucky she found time to learn fluent Russian amid all that piano-playing, eh.

In flagrante not quite delicto

My colleague confided in me the other day – so naturally I share it with you all – that he brought a girl back to the office after a particularly heavy night in the Sports and Social bar. What he, and his squeeze, hadn’t bargained for was that our MP would still be beavering away at his emails. My colleague tells me he didn’t know what was worse, the embarrassment of nearly being caught or the awkwardness on Monday when our boss, who, it's fair to say, has had marriage problems, quietly told him, “Well done. I’d have done exactly the same with a girl like her.”

Cough up for coffee

When people come to meet my MP, I often collect them from the reception area in Portcullis House and take them to a table where my MP will join us. To break any awkwardness, I always ask if I can get them a cup of tea or coffee, or even water. Unfortunately, most plump for an expensive latte. On days with a number of back-to-back meetings, this can end up being quite expensive. Once, after a particularly bad day when I spent nearly £20 on coffees for fucking lobbyists, I mentioned it to my MP. She promised she would reimburse me. Needless to say, I’m still waiting.

Honour intact

My MP was asked by a local do-gooder to write to the Honours committee endorsing a nomination of someone who'd been involved in a number of charitable projects in and around the constituency. We were under explicit instructions to keep the letter secret, but a work experience student inadvertently sent a copy of the letter to the person being nominated. However, despite the secrecy being blown, the individual duly received their honour in the New Year honours list.

A fly on the paywall

It’s a source of constant frustration in our office that The Times has a paywall. How on Earth are we supposed to read the latest Michael Atherton column? Fortunately, an enraged constituent sent an email to my MP after reading an article about housing policy – and kindly sent their login and password so we could view the entire story. I now use it every day, and smile knowing I'm, albeit in a minor way, ripping off Rupert Murdoch and his News International cronies. 

Christmas spirit

I always dread the few months after Christmas, but not because of going back to be worked to the bone again. It's the calls I have to make and the letters to write to relatives of someone who's died to whom my MP had sent a Christmas card. We had a real wakeup call last year when the then office manager forgot to use an updated database. We received a call in January from a longstanding party member, saying that her husband, to whom we sent a card the previous year, was still dead… 

BD: Do you choose particular themes each year for Hay? 

PF: Politically, what we’re always keen to do is look at some of the subjects that are engaging the political class from different perspectives. For example, this year we’re looking at Britain in Europe, but I feel we’ve all heard a lot from David Cameron and Nigel Farage, so we’re bringing in the French ambassador to Berlin, and also the leading Latin American historian Oscar Guardiola-Rivera and Jaideep Prabhu of the Cambridge Judge Business School are speaking. We’re trying to give alternative visions of very familiar issues.

Similarly, we’ve heard a lot from Tony Blair on Iraq. Well, it’s time we heard more from Hans Blix, who was at the time supposedly the person they were trusting to make the decision about whether or not the weapons of mass destruction were real. These things that Hay does are not counterintuitive, but just counter to mainstream ways of looking at things.

Bill Clinton called Hay “Woodstock of the mind”. Is that what you try and create?

It’s quite sweet and funny how this quote came about. [His staff] said: “What do you want him to say?” I thought he was going to devote his life to Palestine, or something, but he wanted to talk about Hay. I thought, ‘Oh fuck, I don’t know – Woodstock of the mind?’ Two months later he gets up and says, ‘I’ve been talking to people and I’ve come to realise this is the Woodstock of the mind’. I’m thinking, ‘Shit, that’s how it works’.

At its best, with Hay, you get to try and mesh or mash the brightest people you can find to look at stuff and explain stuff that’s always baffled you. For me, that stuff is the same for everybody else: conflict, religion, love. For almost a millennium, the way that humans have recorded what we know is by writing it down in books.

The thing that no one says about Hay that always slightly puzzles me, no matter how provocatively we try and force them to doing this, is that we’re really interested in people who don’t agree with what we might think. I suppose I mean ‘I’. I’m really interested in Republican Americans, Christians, eurosceptics and those whose natural affinities are totally different from mine.

Who would be your dream guest who doesn’t reflect anything that you believe in?

I’d love to spend three hours interviewing Rupert Murdoch. He’s utterly brilliant, fascinating and compelling. I heard him give the MacTaggart lecture in Edinburgh about 15… 20 years ago, and it was electrifying. It was so provocative, so forward-thinking, and so absolutely contrary to every principle that I hold dear, but I recognise that, in his field, he’s an absolute genius.

You’re speaking to Jack Straw this year. What do you want to find out?

He fascinates me, partly because of all the Labour gang, he’s the one who’s most obviously the lawyer, and so many of the things that his government did were extraordinary in legal terms. Almost every decision by every home secretary was more reactionary than anything Thatcher’s lot ever dreamed of. The Iraq War engaged a lot of lawyers for what must have been an extraordinarily short period, otherwise they would have come to the more correct legal decision.

There was a very interesting transformation in Jack Straw over the years, which I’m looking forward to discussing. His book’s really interesting, and I’m fascinated by the fact that, of all of that gang, he’s the one who’s come out cleanest. No one is calling for him to be sent to The Hague, and he’s the one who’s probably least disliked. For any elderly politician, that’s an extraordinary thing.

You’re also interviewing Nick Robinson, who is probably the most powerful journalist in Britain, and so has an extraordinary relationship with the top end of government. What do you want to get out of him?

I interviewed him in December and, because I’m an idiot, I didn’t read his book until the night before. I thought it was a book about Nick Robinson and politics, and was thrilled to discover that it was so much more interesting than that.

The stuff about the relationship between Winston Churchill and Lord Reith is extraordinary − even in the Westminster village you have these titans, the heads of these huge organisations, and their relationships are entirely based on their personal animosity. It’s hilarious.

The formative experience of Robinson’s life is when he’s 17 and on holiday. He’s in the back of a car and it crashes, and his best friends both die. One of them was the son of Brian Redhead [BBC radio presenter]. So much of Robinson’s life is still caught up in, or has been driven or focused by that crash, and what he sees as his obligation, both to his friend and to the idea of what he might be able to do. It’s psychologically interesting.

The other great thing about Robinson is that he’s a killer mimic. The only other person I’ve met who can do that is Stephen Fry, who can do anyone, but Robinson’s Cameron and Boris Johnson are hilarious. He should do a run in the West End. He’s a tragic loss to vaudeville, and yet it’s less the interviewing and more me standing back, laughing and clapping along when he tells us about his job.

You’re tabling an event with Justine Roberts, Guido Fawkes, David Prescott, and Jesse Norman MP [The internet and the new constituencies, Friday 24 May]. Why?

It’s entirely possible that in 10 years’ time it won’t matter what the Daily Mail or Murdoch or anybody else feels about politics, because the relationship will be utterly different. There will be people who can talk directly to their MPs, and vice-versa. Nobody five years ago had ever heard of Guido Fawkes, and now this guy seems to be the first port of call for anything thought about politics in Westminster.

A great mate of mine, Shashi Tharoor, is an MP for Kerala in India. He has more Twitter follows than Stephen Fry, and his ability to talk directly to people he’s representing, and their ability to talk directly to him, is an absolute revolution. He doesn’t need the newspapers to report he’s been to a school, because communication’s already open. I’m intrigued by that aspect of how people communicate.

I remember listening to a lecture a few years ago – it might have been Roy Hattersley talking about the shouters at a Gladstone political meeting – and there were people standing 50 yards back from the stage, and then another 50 yards back, relaying what he was saying to people standing behind because there was no method of amplification.

I’m intrigued by that and how different it is now. My children don’t watch TV or read newspapers; they follow Twitter and Facebook for political consumption. All those things about how we connect are interesting.

The other bizarre thing about politicians at Hay is something Robin Cook pointed out when he was here way, way back, after he’d resigned. He was talking about the quality of dialogue, and how if you have a system that isn’t essentially adversarial, conversations can develop. Arguments can be pursued, and it’s unlikely that a generous mind would regard that full-on, combative dialectic would ever produce anything interesting, no extended conversations with people who are smarter than you. It’s fascinating how many politicians come here just to be punters.

How many politicians visit Hay?

We took a quick survey last year, and there were a couple of times when I know that there were seven or eight MPs and about 20 members of the Lords here almost every day. That’s discounting the AMs from Cardiff, all of whom come up in greater numbers. They want to be part of the conversation.

What are your political highlights from previous Hay Festivals?

My big political highlight was when I interviewed John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the UN. He’s what my grandmother used to call a very fine example of himself. He’s about as un-Hay as it is possible for a human being to be, but he was prepared to talk and try and explain where he was coming from. He didn’t quite get why I thought it would be entertaining to waterboard him.

Of the big beasts, FW de Klerk was possibly the most surprising, because it was easier not to fully understand how vital a part of disestablishing apartheid he was; it took Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu and FW de Klerk. It was fascinating to watch him, the way he talked about them, the way he understood what was going to happen and how it could possibly be contained.

Jimmy Carter is by a long way the most gracious, wise and encouraging human being I’ve ever met. He dropped two bits of information in Hay, one in each of the events he did. He knew how to drop them, how to get picked up and the weight of him saying it.

In a press conference that lasted 90 minutes, he casually said that Israel had 150 nuclear warheads. Now, everybody knows that but nobody of any political weight had ever said it publicly. He knew that saying it off-piste in a field in Wales would allow him to say it casually, but would still land with the exact impact he needed it to.

He then engaged David Miliband, who was in town that day, and they disappeared off to go and discuss stuff. The other hilarious thing, I’m sorry to say, was when he was asked, in the gentlest way, what might happen to George Bush Jnr. I’m trying to remember the exact wording, but... He managed to land, ‘Bush should be sent to the fucking Hague’ as the message of what he said with the charming, most disarming, ‘I’m just from Southern Georgia’ attitude. He’s not the most respected of the elders for nothing; this guy is lethal, and deeply impressive.

Is there a particular type of politician who comes to Hay and doesn’t work?

There are some that don’t work. President Musharraf was, in retrospect, a huge mistake. He wasn’t prepared to discuss anything at all. We understood that he was going to be much more conversational, would discuss many of his ideas, but no, he stuck to the script. It was interesting that it didn’t work. I’m trying to think across the political divide… it’s tricky… everyone loves William Hague here because he married Ffion, so he’s practically one of us.

I’ve seen the Welsh Arts Review website, and on it you talk about the kind of person who goes to Hay, or Hay-goers, sceptical about the monarchy and religion, not much bothered about hunting, bothered about illegal invasions, passionately engaged with the environment…

Did I say that?

Yes

It’s not entirely wrong, but it’s hard to generalise. One of the really interesting things is that we’ve been sponsored by newspaper groups over the years. We had three years with The Sunday Times, nine years with the Guardian, three with the Daily Telegraph, and they have all, inevitably, brought over their readers to Hay.

What’s interesting and great about that is that you’ve got an audience that is not in any sense homogenous. They’re widely informed and have differing opinions about everything. The funny thing about being in Hay rather than in South Kensington, Hammersmith or Northampton is that it’s something that speaks to the idea of the big society.

Everybody in the country lives together and is interdependent, because we have to be. Everybody is equal, and in a city you socially self-select – you hang out with people who are like you, but the demography just doesn’t work like that in the country.

Even in our own organisations we’ve got a vast range of political and social plurality because we all live together and know that we don’t have to agree on everything. That’s extraordinarily vibrant, so you do have some quite dynamic conversations about everything. I think that around 35 to 40 per cent of our audience probably come from cities.

That’s actually a fairly small amount…

Well, fewer than 10 per cent of the audience come from the southeast of England, and of that 10 per cent, almost all of them are journalists. They think they see people they know, other people in the lobby… it’s an interesting facet of country life; you’re with people who you don’t share opinions with, and that’s fine.

And it’s really enriching.

The Telegraph Hay Festival runs from 23 May until 2 June in Hay-on-Wye, Herefordshire

Tickets are available on the website www.hayfestival.com

Events will be broadcasted on Sky Arts

Office Politics: How to thrive in a world of lying, backstabbing and dirty tricks

by Oliver James  

Vermilion, £20

Review by David Ruffley, Conservative MP for Bury St Edmonds

“Learn to deal with toxic and over-promoted colleagues,” is this best-selling author’s central claim – and it should be of more than cursory interest to the average jobbing backbencher. And while it contains some entertaining observations, this is a work of pop psychology, not of deep insight.

First, we’re told about “The Psychopath”. He is superficially charming, impulsive, thrill-seeking, lacking in both conscience and empathy, and it’s easy for him to defenestrate colleagues because he’s never weighed down by remorse or guilt.  Josef Stalin and Robert Maxwell are cited as exemplars of this pathology. Apparently one per cent of the general population exhibit psychopathic traits.

Next, we have “The Machiavel”.  This character is cold, calculating, manipulative, ruthless but not without a degree of charm – according to the author, that would include Lord Mandelson and Henry Kissinger. Finally, “The Narcissist” possesses a sense of entitlement and grandiosity, has a superior manner, is self-promoting and expects others to do things for him/her. This tendency to “big up” often leads to them claiming credit for other people’s ideas. American research, the author claims, shows that the numbers of Machiavels are increasing; in 1980 15 per cent of American undergraduates displayed these characteristics, but in 2006 it was 24 per cent. 

There then follows an interesting possible explanation of the emergence of these stereotypes. More people fit these character types – or display elements of all three – now compared with 30 years ago. When a bigger proportion of the workforce worked on production lines, everyone knew where they stood and output could be measured objectively – “How many widgets did you produce today? – but now that more workers are in the professional or service sectors, it’s harder to assess someone’s worth or contribution. Hence the rise of “social skills” in recent times, by which you must make yourself likeable if you want to get on. In an office, we’re told, how you’re perceived is vastly more important than what you actually produce. Appearance is all.

Which skills do you need to succeed at office politics, where the world increasingly takes you at your own estimation? You need four of them, apparently: “Astuteness”: learn how to “read” the boss, find out what he wants and what the organisation expects of you. “Effectiveness” enables you to execute your goal of becoming useful to your superiors. “Networking” is about schmoozing people inside and outside your office, building your own reputation and increasing your chances of a better job somewhere else. Finally, “appear sincere”; if you exude integrity, you’ll be trusted more.

So far, so trite. Much of this is self-evident to the average politico, but James offers some other insights that may prompt them to look afresh at some of their Westminster colleagues. Some in their work life become “impostors”; these individuals consciously – or unconsciously – adopt the manners and behaviour of cultural types: the sporty bloke, the “Bertie Wooster” figure, “ex-Army”, the “farmer type”. It’s an interesting party game to work out which imposture well-known politicians have adopted. I can think of several on both frontbenches.

There’s also a good analysis of something called “chameleonism”, which is where a minion deliberately mirrors a superior’s verbal tics, speech patterns and hand gestures. Copying the mannerisms of your boss is a form of ingratiation, and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. This phenomenon – the “Mini-Me” – is, of course, in evidence among the ranks of MPs struggling up the greasy pole. David Miliband did a pretty good job of aping Tony Blair, and there are several dextrous exponents of “chameleonism” on the current frontbench, though I’m far too much of a party loyalist to name them. We all know who they are.

If you do not like self-help books, this one won’t change your mind, but for those involved in politics it contains useful checklists of the pathologies that we encounter in Parliament. How many do you have in your office?

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order

by Benn Steil

Princeton University Press, £19.95

Review by Keith Simpson, Conservative MP for Broadland, PPS to the foreign secretary

In 2008 as the world was engulfed in the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, both Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown evoked the memory of Bretton Woods, and a rethink of the world financial system. They were joined in 2009 by the governor of The People’s Bank of China, Zhou Xiaochuan, who argued that instability was caused by the absence of a true international currency.

Benn Steil, a distinguished American economist and writer, has gone behind the myths of Bretton Woods and written a provocative, lively and perceptive book that pulls together economics, politics, diplomacy and history and relates it to our current crisis. At its centre is the international conference held at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in the US in July 1944, which created the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and what’s now the World Trade Organization. The conference was dominated by John Maynard Keynes, the British economist representing the UK Treasury, and Harry Dexter White, who effectively represented the US Treasury and masterminded the agenda and the final agreements. This was a titanic struggle between a powerful US and a bankrupt British Empire, both different in background and temperament. Keynes was from a comfortable English academic establishment background, intellectually famous and the first real celeb academic. White, the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, had struggled through hard work and cultivating powerful New Dealers to reach an influential position in the US Treasury.

From the period before the conference, Steil shows that Keynes changed his negotiating stance and overestimated his intellectual ability to persuade the Americans to accept the British position. The author demonstrates that, by 1944, the British Empire was not in a position to negotiate as an equal with the US. The British had been bankrupted by two world wars, and there was little that meant much to Roosevelt or Morgenthau, the US Treasury secretary, in the so-called ‘special relationship’. Just as Churchill found over many years it was impossible to move FDR into an emotional commitment, so Keynes never succeeded in engaging Morgenthau. This stark relationship is all too often missing from British histories of the Second World War and has to be taken into account when considering the strategic and operational disagreements between US General Marshall and UK General Alanbrooke.

The brutal fact was that the US was dollar-rich, holding all the cards, and at Bretton Woods forced through agreements that effectively ended British monetary dominance and broke the trade tariffs and advantages of the Empire. Did a bankrupt Britain have an alternative to total surrender at Bretton Woods? Given that it needed short-term financing, Steil suggests the alternative could have been devaluation and short-term loans on the open markets.

Both Keynes and White died of heart attacks within two years of the summit, Keynes through work, travel and stress, White through stress brought on by investigations into his long-term leaking of government documents and information to the Soviet Union. The structures created by Bretton Woods continue but have failed to meet the new challenges as the US and China struggle to come to terms with a new debtor/creditor relationship.

This book should be read by George Osborne, Ed Balls, the new governor of the Bank of England and Andrew Tyrie, the grand inquisitor of the Treasury select committee.

Who?

Life peer since 2011 and former Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Bow; the second black woman to be elected as an MP, in 1997. King currently divides her time between the Lords, working as diversity executive at Channel 4, and various charity boards.

The restaurant

Quirinale

Named after Rome’s presidential palace, this little Italian restaurant – hidden underground in Millbank, but with the airy brightness of a terrace – is the unassuming home of delicious Italian fare, from stracchino cheese to chocolatey budino.

The menu

Starter Grilled prawns and scallops; radicchio salad with gorgonzola and walnuts.

Main Pearl Tuscan spelt with braised octopus and chilli; stracchino and ricotta-filled ravioli with pumpkin.

Dessert Warm chocolate budino with vanilla ice cream.

We drank Still water; macchiato coffee; Earl Grey tea.     

We discussed

The Milibands Ed has come from being a dead man walking – even a year after he won the leadership, people were saying ‘he’s down-and-out, there’s nothing that can resurrect Labour under Ed Miliband’, and he’s proved that is completely wrong. He’s showing people he has immense talent. I’m really sad to see David [Miliband] go. I think without a shadow of a doubt he’ll be back. I’m fairly certain he’ll be prime minister. They might both manage it!

House of Lords culture shock When I got to the Lords, I needed IT, and they said “you go through Prince’s Chamber, up the stairs, turn right, and it’s next to the sword cupboard”. I just thought ‘oh no’. It’s a cross between Harry Potter and Porridge − sort of a very luxurious prison. I couldn’t believe I’d been sucked back into this antiquated world when I’d just got out. But if you can influence the legislative process from inside, that is the be-all and end-all. The Lords does that, which is a huge contrast from its antiquated demeanour.

Double standards As an MP, I was asked what sexism I’d experienced in politics, and gave an example from before I was elected, when I was a political assistant and an MEP had offered me £10,000 of taxpayers’ money if I’d sleep with him. The Evening Standard put it on the front page, and I was blamed for it – my whip said “it brings your political judgement into question”.

Death threats As an MP, I started to get death threats with the regularity that I used to receive thank-you cards. One of the worst points was around the time of the Millennium, when Scotland Yard gave me a pole with a mirror on the end to check under my car each morning. About the only thing that got me through was a friend telling me to imagine my forefathers who were African-American slaves, and had threats of being lynched every minute of every day and night, and they got through – I drew on their strength.

Gordon Brown The media stereotype doesn’t fit the bill. I had my first policy meeting with him as a spad, and was taking my 18-month-old baby to the childcare centre, but it was shut. I arrived with a baby on my hip. Gordon just looked massively unimpressed. The baby started crying and I looked round and Gordon had gone. I thought he was going to sack me. Then his head popped out from behind his desk, on his hands and knees, and he brought out this train set and played with him for about 10 minutes.

Perfect for

Those eager for diverse and authentic Italian dishes.

Not suitable for

A quick lunch. The food’s rich flavours mean you’ll need a while to take it in.

The cost

Main courses range from £13-£20.

To book a table at Quirinale, call 02072227080 or email info@quirinale.co.uk

What’s your favourite book?

Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Syzmanski – a surprising choice, but I’m a football stat geek. Written with an economist’s brain, it challenges all excepted wisdom in football. Now I understand why my team seems to lose so much…

What’s your least favourite?

Beyond the Crash by Gordon Brown – would’ve saved a lot of trees if he’d simply apologised.

Whom would you like to write a political biography about?

Stanley Baldwin, while prime minister in the 1920s and 1930s, showed an almost contemporary grasp of the art of the political campaign. As a keen, prolific campaigner myself, I can take much from him and his remarkable ability to create a consensus in society.

What was your favourite children’s book?

The Tripods Trilogy by John Christopher.  Set 100 years in the future, yet Earth had retreated to seemingly medieval ways. Ticked all the boxes for me as a teenager, embracing sci-fi, technology and terror.

What’s the most inspiring book you’ve ever read?

House of Cards by Michael Dobbs, a mix of the book and the BBC drama series with the late Ian Richardson.

It really captured my imagination of the world of politics. I remember then telling my careers teacher that I would love to be an MP, who then calmly explained there was no chance of that ever happening.

What’s your favourite political novel?

First Among Equals by Jeffery Archer sparked my appetite for the cut and thrust of politics. For all his faults, Archer can create a cracking rollercoaster read.

Name the most significant book of the last decade

While not technically a book, I will say the Kindle.  As chair of the Libraries APPG, the switch to e-reading is having a profound impact on libraries and traditional bookshops.

What would you like to write a book about?

Robert Buckland MP, with whom I share an office, if for no reason other than I have lots of amusing stories (invariably involving his lateness for everything), and I’m sure he’d be very grateful… I’d probably enjoy writing a book on political campaigning, though the art of canvassing is unlikely to trouble the best sellers’ charts.

Which fictional character would you be?

Roy of the Rovers.

Justin Tomlinson is the Conservative MP for North Swindon

Playwright Howard Brenton’s pared-down script is based on WeiWei’s own account of his arrest, covered in the book Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei by Barnaby Martin. And although it is a story that has filled this book and multiple column inches, Brenton’s play is not afraid of silence. Minutes without dialogue or action bravely drag as the audience is taken through the sheer banality of torture along with the artist, played by an at once rumbustious and reflective Benedict Wong.

This atmosphere of an audience simply observing and interpreting is cultivated by the set – a white, functional gallery space with little but a battered white collapsing cuboid in the centre, where the action (or, more often, inaction) takes place.

Any adornments straying from these bare bones are equally minimalist: claustrophobic webs of masking tape, some tame Chinese floral prints ("why can't he paint leaves and pagodas?"), and two screens bringing us action from hidden depths of the cuboid (WeiWei being accompanied to the toilet by two uniformed guards is both amusing and sickeningly intrusive) and from multiple angles – constant police state surveillance being the rather clunking symbol, but it works niftily as a reflection of installation art.

WeiWei is detained as he tries to board a Hong Kong flight. He is detained for “serious allegations”, and the more nebulous the descriptions of his “crimes”, the more sinister his predicament becomes. He tries to explain his reason for travel is “art” and that he is “an artist”. This is met with incredulity and downright denial by the Chinese authorities. “No, you’re an art worker,” interjects one flummoxed comrade.

The almost endearingly hopeless police murder squad who are inexplicably sent to interrogate him cannot comprehend or articulate his political “crimes”, preferring instead to yell “Conman! Swindler! Liar! Bigamist” at him incessantly. They then earnestly discuss the best preparation for Beijing style noodles. The scowling young guards left to stare at the prisoner for days on end play Super Mario on their phones. It is this mix of triviality and extreme repression that slathers the production in poignancy – albeit with one too many Twitter references (is this the first play with a hashtag in the title?).

Slender artsy youths encircle the action taking pictures and videoing on their smartphones. They pose beside the yellowing box which contains WeiWei enshrouded in a black hood – the threat of violence is only ever implied, as one Communist official explains chillingly, “the aim is a broken soul, not a broken body.”

These tweeting youngsters somewhat cheapen the scene changes, but perhaps this is the point. The dissident’s detainment is simply an extension of his conceptual art. He’s not just “a lunatic who cuts up old chairs.” He’s a symbol of the struggle against Chinese repression, all too often overlooked in a West capitulating to the Communist state’s free market flourishing.

There are all the Chekhovian trappings of helplessness, nihilistic flippancy and bickering about tea, in equal measure, rendering obsessive scientist and master of the town Protasov’s household a tinderbox of middle-class terror, guilt and derision at the rumblings of the imminent 1905 revolution.

Gorky, a pseudonym meaning ‘bitter’, wrote the play from a prison cell months before this turbulent year of abortive uprisings. His script, adapted by playwright Upton, who was behind the National’s successful Philistines (another Gorky play) of 2007, echoes the claustrophobia and conflicted feelings towards unrest felt by the incarcerated creative, who would go on to have a stormy relationship with Stalin.

Based in a bright, airy estate – the set is all wooden beams and rustic brick – closed off from a town heaving with discontented workers battling a cholera outbreak, the production focuses on Protasov's ideas and failings. A pathetic and preoccupied character, played with lashings of nonplussed quavering by Geoffrey Streatfeild, like a pigeon with a doctorate.

“I need to go and warm my yeast”, he blinks innocuously, bustling back into his lab, where he toils night and day on his “quest for sense” while the world crumbles around his sulphurous ivory tower.

The increasingly incensed townsfolk believe his chemicals leaking into the water supply are “boiling up” the cholera and killing the masses. They don’t have time to wait for the 200 years of scientific discovery towards life’s meaning – and inventing glass bottles and oak tree-based waistcoats – of which Protasov celebrates being a pioneer. The often discussed “sun” of enlightenment blinds him.

Yet his almost pantomime oblivion (‘the murderous revolutionaries are BEHIND you!’ you feel like screaming), and the farcical way in which a handful of other key characters are played really jars with the weighty subjects discussed and nuanced misery portrayed by a few of the other actors.

For example, the beautifully ludicrous neurosis of Melaniya, who harbours an unrequited love for the scientist, is played with madcap abandon by Lucy Black – “My eggs are yours”, she whimpers, and then later the delicious line, “I didn’t read your books. I licked them. I rubbed them all over my naked body and licked them.”

This clashes with the subtle melancholia of troubled Liza, Protasov’s sister, played by a delicately distressed Emma Lowndes, who seems to be the only character with a social conscience. She cradles a newspaper throughout that looks suspiciously like the Guardian, lamenting the pain of the poor, and decries the “dark and putrid” behaviour of her household in a bizarre scene where they all whoop and throw eggs at each other, the floor, the walls.

It is impossible to see the blustering Protasov as a tragic hero whose hubris brings down society, himself, and his loved ones with it. Equally the odious, strutting artist Vageen (Gerald Kyd) -  “it’s faaabulous”, he occasionally drawls – is an unlikely amorous companion of Protasov’s stoic wife, Yelena (Justine Mitchell).

More likely as a flawed hero is the chemist’s best friend, Boris – affably intense, romantically cynical - whose thirsty unrequited passion for Liza (everyone’s love is unreturned in this play) drives him to hollow jokes and touching hopelessness. He is played subtly by Paul Higgins.

Neither the refined nor the melodramatic way to play these characters is wrong, or any less entertaining, it’s just they belong in different plays. Unfortunately the discord ends up between the actors, rather than the personae they portray.

For the uninitiated, it is a food, made with oatmeal, onion and suet and should never be confused with ‘skirl’, which is the noise of the bagpipes. 

And this is where my hinterland starts – with cooking, and a real love of Scottish traditional music and ceilidh dancing. On Saturday nights in our house the two came together, after the football reports were finished on the radio and when Take the Floor started, a BBC programme that kept traditional music alive when its popularity declined, particularly among younger Scots. Dinner was cooked while the reels and jigs were being played on the radio. So when our children were young, we had a family ceilidh up and down the kitchen.

There’s something really infectious about a good jig or reel. I defy anyone to keep from tapping their feet in time to the uplifting beat. There is nothing like the sight of a room full of people dancing the same steps – well, basically the same ones – birling and swinging partners round the floor. Dances such as the Gay Gordons, Boston Two-Step, Canadian Barn Dance, the Dashing White Sergeant, and of course the Eightsome Reel and Strip the Willow are all part of my repertoire. However, sometimes you need to catch breath, so these are interspersed by the Pride of Erin and the St Bernard’s Waltzes. I was once asked by an English man who was at a ceilidh how we all knew the steps. He was astonished to find out that in Scotland we learn the dances at school and you never forget the steps. So when you go to a ceilidh in many parts of Scotland, all of the family join in, from the youngest to grannies like me.

However, all this dancing fare sets up an appetite, so pretty early on I learned to cook. I have piles of cookbooks and will always try out something new. I love making soup – my current favourite is sweet potato, roasted peppers and Tabasco – and every weekend I make a pot to leave when I go back to London. My favourite is trying out new casseroles, and when we have guests, I am pleased to see clean plates. And for afters, I make a mean shortbread and carrot and courgette cake.

The only complaint I ever had was from my father in my younger days, who told me that pineapple was a fruit for pudding and not an accompaniment for gammon, which was fashionable at the time. He was right of course – although I am not averse to a sweet and sour pork.

Anne McGuire is Labour MP for Stirling and shadow work and pensions minister

It’s almost a cliché for a politician to pick Caro’s monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson, and I feel like I’m cheating because I know other MPs have nominated this magnificent tome too, but it’s simply an extraordinary read.

I picked up this copy just as it was published about 10 years ago in Washington DC when I was visiting my good friend Rachel Reeves, who was then an economist at our embassy.

Johnson was such a complicated character, full of contradictions. Indeed, during his political career he often embodied everything the public doesn’t like in a politician –publicity obsessed, often cruel to family, friends and staff, ruthless and bullying towards colleagues.

And yet he pushed through great advances such as civil rights legislation by sheer force of personality even when Democrats disagreed with him.

It’s said that Johnson had a brilliant sense for counting noses – as a whip myself, I appreciate how important such a skill is. Given the government has lost some high profile votes recently in the Commons, maybe Master of the Senate should be required reading for all in the government Whips’ Office.

Jon Ashworth is Labour MP for Leicester South