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Ivor Gaber enjoys a biography of an Oxford don who became the UK's first on-screen pollster
Sultan of Swing: The Life of David Butler
By Michael Crick
Biteback Publishing, 416pp, £25.00
ISBN 9781785904387
Published 25 October 2018
On the face of it, a biography of an Oxford politics don who became the UK's first on-screen pollster sounds like the perfect present...for political nerds only. But that would do a grave disservice to an absorbing account of the past half-century of British politics and academia, seen through a unique prism; and written with the style and empathy that you would expect from one of the country's most persistent and imaginative political correspondents, Channel 4's Michael Crick.
David Butler's life as the go-to pollster for politicians began when, as a 25-year-old research student at Nuffield College, Oxford, he was summoned to give the leader of the opposition a private briefing on the prospects...