When Boris Johnson, in the distant days when he was merely foreign secretary, was said to have remarked “fuck business” in response to concerns from business leaders about Brexit uncertainty, the City was outraged. It seemed to confirm their worst fears: the government no longer took them seriously.

For some, this reaction was hard to understand: after all, despite Johnson’s remark, the Conservative Party has always had a close relationship with business. It is its raison d’être.

In F**k Business, Iain Anderson helps to explain the depth of that consternation – and in doing so he provides enough new information to make up for the fact that his book asks us to spend yet more time thinking about Brexit. Thankfully, this account differs from other Brexit volumes in that the focus isn’t simply Brexit, but the relationship between business and the government during a period that happened to coincide with the torturous attempts to leave the European Union.

The book is at its most incisive when it documents Anderson’s personal experiences during the Tories’ wilderness years.

Anderson, a lifelong Tory, is also the chairman of the Cicero Group; he has had a front-row seat in politics for decades. The book is semi-autobiographical, and tracks Anderson’s own experiences. It is interspersed with an impressive array of tidbits from all sorts of senior figures from business, politics and …