Prime minister's summer reading list headed by comic novel about antics at a Dublin public school
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David Cameron will be reading about antics at a Dublin public school while on holiday in Italy. Photograph: Wpa Pool/Getty Images
I suggested earlier today, perhaps a little unfairly, that David Cameron would be taking the collected works of Jeremy Clarkson on holiday with him to Italy.
It is true that the prime minister, who regularly breaks bread with his "Chipping Norton set" near neighbour, loves Clarkson's column in the Sunday Times.
But Cameron appears not to have taken any Clarkson books with him. He has instead taken Skippy. Top of his summer reading is the novel Skippy Dies, a comic account of life at a Dublin Catholic public school. The prime minister has also taken a heavy tome – Simon Sebag Montefiore's Jerusalem: The Biography.
This is what the prime minister wrote for the Spectator's summer reading list published this afternoon:
I've been reading a book called Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, an Irish writer. I read it when I was in Ibiza and I haven't managed to finish it, so I've picked it up again. What else have I got? I tend to have a pile of books that I dip into. For instance, I've got Simon Sebag Montefiore's Jerusalem. I've been reading that from the end backwards, which is a slightly strange approach.
Skippy Dies received a rave review in the Guardian by Patrick Ness who wrote of its "661 glorious pages". This is what Ness wrote:
Skippy is Daniel "Skippy" Juster, so nicknamed because of his unfortunate resemblance to a certain TV kangaroo. He's a boarder at Seabrook College, an expensive Catholic school in Dublin, and is at that unfortunate age where "suddenly everyone was tall and gangling and talking about drinking and sperm. Walking among them is like being in a BO-smelling forest."
So we now know the differences between Britain's main party leaders. The prime minister will be laughing in the grounds of his Tuscan villa about Howard the Coward, the history master who sleeps with Miss McIntyre, a substitute teacher. Ed Miliband will, as I blogged earlier, be reading some serious tomes about political leadership and the economy. Benedict Brogan has posted a nice blog about this.
If Skippy Dies appear a trifle light for a prime minister, then his inclusion of Jerusalem: The Biography shows that Cameron has a serious side. This was probably recommended by Michael Gove, one of the few genuine intellectuals around the cabinet table, who hailed it in the Times as "supremely ambitious".
Cameron's former tutors at Oxford, where he took a first in PPE, may be sad to learn from their former star pupil that he appears to have trouble in finishing books. He read, but didn't finish, Ian McEwan's novel Solar earlier this year.
Perhaps Cameron should follow the example of Harold Macmillan, the last Etonian to serve as prime minister for more than a year. Macmillan used to shoo ministers away while he was reading Trollope.