A lot about handbags and frocks’ … Margaret Thatcher talks to Charles Moore. Photograph: Nick Rogers/Rex

The British political book that most moved me this year is not a political book at all. Former home secretary, Alan Johnson's This Boy (Bantam) is an often harrowing memoir of his impoverished 1950s childhood at the northern fringe of Notting Hill, which, though not as grand as it is today, still represented two utterly different worlds divided by a few streets.

Alan's dad was a charming wastrel, Steve "Ginger" Johnson, a womanising pub pianist who blew his chance of a musical career and left the chores and cost of raising a family to Lily, his scouser wife. Too poor to accept her 11?plus place, she worked herself to death in the Rachmanite-slum-landlord mean streets of W10, a place of outside loos and candles, of always being cold and hungry, of hiding from the rent man and getting false teeth because they're cheaper.

That Johnson survived all this to become a cabinet minister able to tell the tale with style and humour – but no glib political conclusions – is thanks to his formidable sister Linda. Just three years older than Alan, she was always the family's adult. When the offer of a council flat came two weeks after their mum's death, Linda had the gall to turn it down (too nasty and damp) while insisting to Mr Pepper, the social worker, that she be allowed to raise Alan. Linda was 16 and Mr Pepper took a gamble on her. Would he be allowed to now?

When congratulating the author in a Westminster corridor I said: "You must include a footnote in the paperback edition telling us what later happened to Linda." Johnson replied: "My publisher has asked for a second volume, it will be in there." Excellent. It will make a better underdog's case for Labour than most manifestos.

The political book, also a two-volume job, that most impressed me in 2013 did so unexpectedly. Charles Moore was one of the original Young Fogies of the 1980s, a precocious editor or the Spectator, later of the Daily Telegraph, a highbrow Etonian in thrall to much of what Margaret Thatcher came to represent. How could be write other than a sycophantic authorised biography of her, so many of us at Westminster assumed? Yet his first volume, Not for Turning (Allen Lane), which takes her career as far as the Falklands war of 1982, is a triumph. Moore admires his subject, but he is not afraid of her or unwilling to address her failings. He has also got hold of a lot of previously unavailable material, notably the gossipy letters that young Margaret Roberts (never a diary writer) sent to her older sister, Muriel, during their impressionable teens. Margaret even plays Madame Merle to Muriel's Isabel Archer, palming off a discarded lover (no sex, Moore stresses) who became Muriel's husband. There is a lot about handbags and frocks, but not about the war that Thatcher managed to avoid by getting into Oxford early. She rarely gave much credit to luck, but Moore discovered just how lucky she was to win her nomination ("Tories Choose Beauty") in Finchley in 1958: the agent was so impressed that he fiddled the result so that the male winner lost. Without that fiddle, which won her vital ministerial experience before 1964, there would have probably been no Thatcherism.

Journalist authors need sources and need to keep them sweet. So Matthew d'Ancona, another clever Tory hack, albeit more liberal in outlook, had a more delicate task than Moore, writing In It Together (Viking) about the current government while relying on some very good sources. Clearly George Osborne is more highly valued than "Needy Nick" Clegg or IDS – definitely not All Souls material. So the chancellor's abandonment of most of the goals he set himself in 2010 does not get the attention it deserves. D'Ancona is a graceful writer and has some revealing stories to tell. He has written a good book, but a courtier's book and a tactical one. It will become better when heavily revised or rewritten in due course.

The book that shocked me most was Damian McBride's Power Trip (Biteback), the behind-the-scenes tale of his career as a Gordon Brown apparatchik. McBride is clever and hard-working (despite the booze); his book reads like a selective confession to a Catholic priest. He leaked to make Tony Blair look greedy and lazy, to stitch up Gordon's rivals and the Tories too when he had the time, cheerfully rifling the government's policy hamper to further his goals. I thought I knew a lot about this world. I was naive, but remain grateful for my ignorance. McBride debauched the system because he believed Brown would be a great PM. As usual, alas, the feral press emerges badly from his account.

None of which will shock learned professors such as Anthony King and Ivor Crewe, who have compiled a notable indictment of modern British politics and administration in The Blunders of Our Governments (Oneworld) from pensions misselling to the Millennium Dome – the O2 arena to you – via Thatcher's poll tax, hubristic and fatal. This exercise is offered as a welcome antidote to traditional establishment complacency on which both distinguished authors dined so long, a splendid dipping-into volume to feed fashionable public distain for the fragile art of politics. As King and Crewe (the very names evoke the British class hierarchy) admit, they have not been able to compare the UK's performance with other countries' blunders, so it will not appeal to Ukip voters. Nor was it written for them, though it may assist the Farage insurgency.

Tony Benn's final volume of diaries, A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine (Hutchinson), may help too. Many readers will find these diaries delightful, a reflection of their own loathing for Blair, their disappointment with Brown's betrayals, their distaste for the capitalism that has given so many of them comfortable lives. Others will find fresh evidence of a man who is at best a holy innocent, seemingly unable to distinguish between the merits of Nelson Mandela and Richard Branson, at worst a self-absorbed old hypocrite who contributed much to Labour's decline as a political force. I am in the second camp. Benn still lives a life of great privilege (not far from Alan Johnson's slum) where strangers rush to pay his restaurant bills, hoteliers let him smoke and even policemen smile when his car breaks down outside the Ministry of Justice.

Former Benn acolyte Michael Meacher, an MP for 43 years, offers his own remedies for Britain's fragile condition in The State We Need (Biteback), a conscious echo of Will Hutton's well-known volume. There is much to be said for Meacher's bleak diagnosis of a money-driven, spiritually desolate culture running on unsustainable principles and practices, though his supposedly non-partisan remedies read like a return to the dirigiste ambitions of his fiery youth, with supervisory boards and regulators on every corner. Such attempts to implement them gave Meacher's fellow-Manichean Thatcher her opportunity to reverse the social democratic gains of 1945. The much-admired German model has moved her way too.

Harry Mount's The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson (Bloomsbury) contains more wit than wisdom, but Mayor Johnson is wiser about what makes human society tick than Meacher, deplorably superficial though much of his off-the-cuff cleverness is. He is also much more aware of his privileged life than is the patrician Benn, less egotistical and much better/funnier at having his plum cake and eating it. "Bogus self-deprecation" is the hallmark of Boris's style, notes Mount in a witty introduction of his own, which also points out that the mayor has a Frenchman's sense of shame about his own misconduct – none at all. Thus Mount is vaguely ashamed to have belonged to the hooligan Bullingdon Club at Oxford, but Boris cries "Buller, Buller, Buller" when they meet.

Let us make a vain attempt to spoil Boris's day by giving someone else the last word. Mount quotes Charles Moore quoting David Niven on Errol Flynn. "You always knew where you were with Errol Flynn. He always let you down." Will Boris's offer to the British people, what Meacher would despairingly dismiss as "bread and circuses", let us down in due course? Or is this the best we can hope for – to chuckle in the gathering gloom?