Behind most successful memoirs there is a successful ghostwriter, ploughing away in the background, crossing the i’s and dotting the t’s — we all know that. This is especially true of memoirs released with an eyebrow-raising proximity to the events it depicts: speed is essential, and someone needs to help collate notes and evidence.
In the case of Matt Hancock’s bombshell memoir The Pandemic Diaries, in which the former Health Secretary details his experiences running the UK’s Covid response at the height of the pandemic, this helping hand was extended by Isabel Oakeshott, a political journalist and right-of-centre television commentator who, in her own words, “left newspapers to write books,” but “never stopped breaking big stories”.
