Iain Dale has listed all of the books that Keith Simpson has recommended for Tory MPs as they relax on the beaches of Tuscany and Cornwall.
If I could recommend one book for Tory MPs it would be Marvin Olasky's Tragedy of American Compassion. It chronicles the failure of America's welfare state and explains why the compassion of families and voluntary organisations is superior. He writes about "stingy" forms compassion that essentially amount to feeding-and-forgetting:
"The priest and the Levite who passed by the beaten traveller in chapter ten of Luke’s gospel probably tithed, but they were stingy - only the Good Samaritan was not.
A professor who gives high grades to mediocre papers, so that students will go away happy and he need not explain how they erred, is stingy.
Parents who give their children Nintendos or Turbographic 16s but do not walk with them by the roadside and play games with them on the dining room table are stingy."
What book would you recommend for a Conservative MP?
