To use the hot political word of the moment, Nancy Pelosi’s The Art of Power is a pretty weird kind of memoir, neither fish nor fowl. It would, she tells us in her acknowledgments, take another book to relate her amazing rise from “housewife [and mother of five] to House member to House speaker”, her long journey “from Baltimore to San Francisco”. In this volume, one eye on posterity, she prefers to look mostly at the part she played in major political events during the more than two decades she spent at the top of the Democratic party. But fear not: it’s all (a bit) less dry than it sounds. If I struggled to stay awake during her painstaking description of the battle to pass the Affordable Care Act of 2010 – quiz me later! – I was gripped by her hour-by-hour account of the attack on the US Capitol in 2021.
Who knew that on that shocking day some representatives were so sure they were about to die, they rang their families to say goodbye? That those with military training fashioned pikes from the wooden stands that held anti-Covid hand sanitiser in case they had to physically defend themselves? Pelosi is a Catholic, and the riot, as she notes, took place on the feast of the Epiphany, which celebrates the visit of the wise men to the infant Christ. But for the Republicans, revelations came there none. In the fullness of time, Donald Trump, for many akin to the riot’s puppeteer, became the party’s candidate for the presidency in spite of what some of them had seen with their own eyes on 6 January: the “stunning” violence that was all around; the fact that politicians had to make use, for the first time, of the gas masks that have been kept under seats in the Capitol’s two chambers since 9/11; the lingering memory, once it was all over, that the building stank to high heaven of human defecation.
