Picador pre-empts McTague's 'extraordinary' Brexit story

Picador has pre-empted an "extraordinary" account of how Britain left the EU after 40 years' membership, from Atlantic journalist Tom McTague.

Publishing director Georgina Morley pre-empted world English-language print, digital and audio rights for The Conquest: The Fracturing of Britain from Toby Mundy at Aevitas. Picador will publish as a super-lead non-fiction title in 2023.

In The Conquest, McTague depicts how the UK has become the fractured place it now is, exiting from the EU after 40 years, "following a splenetic campaign for sovereignty and control that built on decades of political mismanagement and complacency".

Picador explained: “McTague skilfully weaves together the politics and the personalities behind the decades of ideological conflict that brought the UK to the 2016 Brexit vote, to tell the story of how a group of ardent young Conservatives—from Patrick Robertson (founder of the Bruges group while still at Oxford), to Dominic Cummings, to Daniel Hannan, to Nigel Farage, to the present Cabinet—seized the prize on 23rd June 2016, before going further than their presiding spirit, Margaret Thatcher, could ever have imagined.”

McTague is a staff writer at the Atlantic and co-author of Betting the House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election (Biteback).

He said: “The raw drama of this story is extraordinary in and of itself: how a rag-tag collection of Eurosceptics went from almost total defeat to total victory. But it is also a story that reveals deeper and uncomfortable truths about modern Britain, as well as the European Union and the wider global economy. It is one of the defining stories of our time and I’m thrilled to be able to tell properly.”

Morley commented: “I read Tom’s proposal very late one night but despite the hour I was utterly gripped. The Conquest promises to be one of those rare books that takes what seems to be a familiar, even tired story and tells it in such a way as to turn everything you thought you knew on its head. It is living history and promises to be both brilliant and revelatory.”