The Book List: What guilty pleasures were on David Cameron's bookshelf in Downing Street?

The Last Testament by Sam Bourne
Blood & Rage by Michael Burleigh
The Blair Years by Alastair Campbell
Alistair Cooke’s America
Thinking the Unthinkable by Richard Cockett
Book of the Dead by Patricia Cornwell
The Glassbook of the Dreameaters by GW Dahlquist
Engleby by Sebastian Faulks
A Million Bullets by James Fergusson

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The Outcast by Sadie Jones
Austerity Britain by David Kynaston
Dark Continent by Mark Mazower
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Brown’s Britain by Robert Peston
The Spin Doctor’s Diary by Lance Price
August 1914 by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross
Douglas Hurd: The Public Servant by Mark Stuart
Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls by Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis
Chambers Book of Speeches

Bookshelves are great for branding. If we are what we read, a bookshelf becomes a public mirror for anybody who wants to find out who we really are or who we want to suggest we are, something about us that perhaps isn’t so easily seen. Sometimes books have nothing to do with reading.

When David Cameron was interviewed by Andrew Marr for the BBC in 2009 in the agonisingly long build-up to the 2010 general election, the meeting took place in the MP’s home in West London. This gave eagle-eyed viewers the chance to virtually browse the future prime minister’s bookcase, conveniently situated behind his chair.

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Apart from perhaps the Sam Bourne, there are few guilty pleasures here or indications of obsessional fandom. Nor are they arranged in any particular order, by spine colour, or alphabetically. It’s heavy on worthy reads, recent history, politics and key issues such as terrorism, Afghanistan and spin doctoring, but also features a fairly eclectic range of fiction (thrillers, literary fiction and genre-bending – Saturn’s Children is a science-fiction novel in which humans have become extinct and a female courtesan robot becomes involved in a class robot struggle).

Although it is impossible to decipher every title on the bookshelf, it may also contain Cameron’s stated favourite books, Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s The River Cottage Cookbook, which he chose on Desert Island Discs. His favourite children’s book, Our Island Story by Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall, is probably in one of his children’s bedrooms. The Camerons’ bookshelves continued to dominate the post-election news agenda, appearing in their Downing Street flat when German chancellor Angela Merkel visited the prime minister and Michelle Obama visited his wife Samantha. Again, there was close scrutiny of the titles in their kitchen/dining area (as well as the bookshelf itself, £665 from OKA) which included:

Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management
The Essential House Book by Terence Conran
Art and Artists by Jeremy Kingston
Provence Interiors and Paris Interiors by Lisa Lovatt-Smith
On Royalty by Jeremy Paxman
The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit
Complete Works of William Shakespeare
The River Cottage Every Day by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
The Ginger Pig Meat Book by Tim Wilson and Fran Warde
The Abs Diet by David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker

Although press comments about the intellectual nature of their content were not wholly positive, this seems slightly harsh as few of us keep our Proust in the pantry. Social media has added a whole new dimension to the game of political book-spotting. In the 2015 general election campaign, Ukip’s then deputy leader Paul Nuttall appeared in a promotional photograph standing in front of a bookshelf full of books. However, some of these appear to have been photoshopped in and at least one pile of books can be seen twice in the image. Replying to this charge, Mr Nuttall tweeted: “It’s not true. I just have two copies of every book!”

‘A Book of Book Lists’ by Alex Johnson, £7.99, British Library Publishing

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