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While all eyes in the US turned to the dramatic release of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, across the Atlantic a separate political thriller continued its second bestselling month. Tim Shipman’s Fallout (London: William Collins, 2017) spills the guts of British politics for the past year, laying plain for all who read the treacherous, if not lurid, tale about the British governments tough slog to survive the Trump Administration’s unprecedented dysfunction. Although much of this 559-page work is steeped in what Americans might consider British political “inside baseball,” authoritative accounts based on interviews by Shipman broadly corroborate the Fire and Fury narrative. As told by Shipman, little in this comprehensive work will prove any reassurance to wary English readers on the reliability of its special US ally under Trump.
Of course, Trump’s assault on the UK was in full swing throughout his campaign, as he accused Britain in 2015 of “trying hard to disguise their massive Muslim problem,” and of having “no-go” areas where cowering police dared not venture. Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London, decried Trump’s remarks as “betraying a quite stupefying ignorance that makes him, frankly, unfit to hold the office of president of the United States,” while then Prime Minister David Cameron called Trump “divisive, unhelpful and quite simply wrong.”
