BiteBack Publishing

Mark Oaten's candid tale of stress, depression and what it's like to be caught in the eye of a scandal.

At the beginning of 2006, Mark Oaten was a highly successful politician, the Liberal Democrats’ home affairs spokesman, a shining light of his party and in the running to take over from Charles Kennedy as leader.Then his world collapsed.

Shortly after announcing he was withdrawing from the race to succeed Kennedy, he was caught up in the biggest political scandal of the year, when the News of the World revealed he had been visiting a male escort.

In Screwing Up, Mark Oaten offers a fascinating and moving insight into how he dealt with this situation. But the book is also a compelling and often humorous account of life inside the real Westminster – from Mark’s dramatic two-vote election victory in 1997 to being thrown out of Parliament, from terrorism negotiations with Tony Blair following the London bombings to life working for Charles Kennedy, and the often absurd world of a constituency MP.

This is the most honest account of life in Parliament in a decade. But it is not merely a political memoir, it is the deeply touching and human tale of a man at his wits’ end. And above all it is the story of a man trying to cope with the onset of middle age.