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RAKE'S PROGRESS by Rachel Johnson

RAKE'S PROGRESS

The Madcap True Tale of My Political Midlife Crisis

by Rachel Johnson

Pub Date: July 13th, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-31819-5
Publisher: Knopf

A British journalist chronicles her 2019 run for office as a pro–European Union centrist just as her pro-Brexit conservative brother took office as prime minister.

Johnson remembers two things about her distinguished political family. First, that her brother Boris wanted to be “World King” from the time he was a small boy; and second, that her Oxford-educated mother believed it was a mistake to educate girls and then “not deliver” on the implied promise of social equality. Her later experiences in the male-dominated British education and employment systems eventually led her to conclude that “ ‘statecraft’ was reserved for men. And Margaret Thatcher, of course.” But when a new party that merged Brexit dissenters from both the left and the right emerged at the height of the controversy in 2019, she took notice. Change UK approached Johnson, who had already gone on record as being a “fervent and noisy Remainer,” and asked her to run for a position as a member of the European Parliament. She accepted and soon realized that her background as a working mother “was actually a perfect preparation for the shitshow that is dipping a toe into politics.” Work colleagues openly told her she would lose while social media detractors sniped Johnson for her “Seventies porn star” hair and other trifling matters. Many members of the media and the political establishment—as well as most of the members of her own family, including Boris, who became prime minister shortly after she lost the election in May—ignored that she was even running for office. Illustrated throughout with personal photos, this quietly feminist book not only offers humorous insight into the politics of a divided, madly competitive family. Johnson also reveals how conservative extremism and the politics of fear are not just an American issue, but are reshaping the political world as we know it.

A wittily provocative look at British politics.