MCGUIRE: Before you started your bookstore, you went around and looked at what was going on elsewhere, is that right?

DALE: I was a lobbyist before. I had no experience of books, retailing, anything. All I knew about was politics. I got the idea from a few shops that I saw on trips to Washington. Some were political-memorabilia shops; others were general bookshops with a coffee shop. I thought a mixture of the two might work quite well in London because there is the same sort of political clique here.

You’re not just a bookstore.

We’ve tried to cater more to the political obsessive, if you like. We’re the only bookshop in the country that stocks think-tank reports and all the political publications. We stock memorabilia like signed letters from Gladstone and Disraeli and all that sort of thing. But we don’t concentrate on the more touristy, kitschy items.

But you do a bit of that, don’t you?

Well, we have just commissioned a set of political lingerie–knickers [panties] with such slogans as I LIKE THE SMACK OF FIRM GOVERNMENT and PROTECTION IS A NECESSITY, NOT AN EXPEDIENT and Disraeli quotes and things like that.

What is the best-selling thing you’ve ever sold here–book, lingerie or otherwise?

The best-selling book, I think I’m right in saying, was a study of the British general election in 1997. Very boring–which I suppose is the sort of thing you would expect us to sell a lot of. Outside of books, we sell a lot of videos. We did a video last Christmas called “Party Political Broadcasts,” something for the ultimate obsessive collector. We have sold a thousand of those through here. It was one of the cult hits of last Christmas–the ultimate Christmas present for someone you hate. So we started doing a few more videos. This year’s one is going to be “Great Speeches in Parliament.”

Are you surprised sometimes by what does and doesn’t sell?

There are always surprises. There’s a book [on entrepreneurship] out at the moment by [journalist] Charles Leadbeater, called “Living on Thin Air.” Now, if you’d said, “How many copies would that sell?,” I would have said five or six. But I can’t get enough of them. I would never think about reading a book like that, but there are obviously a lot of people that like light political theory.

That book was marketed as an insight into [Prime Minister] Tony Blair’s economic thinking.

Yes, well, that always sells. Particularly when we opened, before the last election, everyone–lobbyists, media–everyone was crying out for knowledge about New Labour and what would they do, what were they like, where did they come from. We would get people from the embassies coming in and buying every single book that mentioned Labour or Blair on the cover, with no idea what the book was, really. Which was fine for us.

What about books by or about former prime ministers?

I spend half my life trying to tell journalists that political biography is not a dying art. [Former Conservative prime minister] Ted Heath’s book has done quite well. [Former Conservative prime minister John] Major’s book [due out this autumn], I think, will be one of the best-selling memoirs of all time. He’s got a lot to say, he’s got a lot of dirt to dish and he’s going to dish it. Margaret Thatcher’s are, I think, the best-selling political memoirs of all time.

And Monica Lewinsky?

I think her book was overserialized. If you read it in The Sunday Times over three weeks, why are you going to spend £17 on it? Well, I sold 40 copies. And I would have sold only 20, but I actually got 20 signed copies.

Has Politico’s been a success?

Well, we’re still here, and that’s the main thing. I think we’ve made much more of a mark than I thought we would in terms of our profile, and I think the name Politico’s means something. I don’t expect to become a millionaire out of running a bookshop, but if you get paid for doing your hobby for a job, what more can you want?

And you’re not ashamed to tell people that you sell books, presumably?

Absolutely not. I’m not even ashamed to tell people I sell political knickers.