In his intro to No Way Out, finally charting the long, strange trip the UK took from the fraught post-referendum days to leaving the EU in January 2020, Tim Shipman risks a comparison political biographers would shy away from. He declares an urge to match the epic and literary style of Robert Caro’s multi-volume accounts of the Lyndon B Johnson era in US politics — a daunting bar.
When it comes to Brexitology however, Shipman has had a sound claim to the mantle of master chronicler in his Sunday Times berth. His ensuing books are a clinical pathologist’s approach to the impacts of Brexit, which puts it outside the realm of all those polemics telling us why it was either a catastrophe for the UK, a brilliant idea which somehow came off wrong, or (a dwindling group this, last one) an idea which will one day be wholly vindicated — albeit with no firm date on that commitment.
