This summer I decided to do something stupid: read the 38 books on the list that the Tory leader, David Cameron, issued his MPs for the recess. I must have been suffering from a chemical imbalance. I read fast. Still, 38 books was a stretch. But a lot was at stake: a glimpse into the brain of Cameron's Conservative Party, or at least how he would like them to think.

When I started I was worried. At the local elections I voted Conservative for the first time because a friend was standing as a candidate for Northumberland's new unitary authority. He did not win. I have learnt to live with the guilt, but I certainly do not want to vote Tory again. Would the Conservative reading list turn me into a Cameroonie? At the very least, would it make me want to send my sons to Eton?

Given that it was the summer holidays, unless I was prepared for my three children to divorce me, I knew that I would have to cut corners. My first insight into the Conservative brain at work.

Three of the books were not even “out”. (Keen as mustard these Tories, recommending books that are not yet published.) Another issue was price. I decided against ordering one for £66.99 and another for £46.75, on the ground that the Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, would not give any Tory the go-ahead for that level of spending commitment. I ordered the rest; including postage, it came to more than £500. So much money that I had to tell my commissioning editor that she could pay me for this column in books. This was not a good deal for a working journalist, unless the books made me such a convincing Conservative that I was selected for a safe seat at the next election. In which case, I would have to kill myself.

When I piled up the remaining 33 books, the stack reached my tummy-button. I was not naked when I did this. I was, however, daunted. I packed a dozen books in a cardboard box for a rainy week in Yorkshire, and started with the biography of Boris Johnson, because Ken Livingstone describes it as “the scariest thing I've read since The Silence of the Lambs”, and I rather liked The Silence of the Lambs. I learnt that lots of people think Boris Johnson might be a future Prime Minister (these people include Boris Johnson). The book gives warning that “the emerging rivalry between Cameron and Boris will mark the next period of our politics as deeply as the Blair-Brown rivalry marked Labour's years of prosperity.” I worry for the Tories.

The following week, at home in Northumberland, I managed only a book on political hypocrisy. David Runciman, the author - and an Eton contemporary of Cameron - argues that political hypocrisy is unavoidable and not worth worrying about. I doubt that this is a good lesson for Conservative MPs. I decided against reading a memoir of the Thatcher years as it was serialised in The Sunday Times. Nor did I have to plough through Ffion Hague's account of the women in Lloyd George's life, having caught it on Radio 4 while having a bath. Thank God: there are 553 pages of these women.

The real work began. Unsurprisingly for the Conservatives, the list was dominated by history, including the Nazi occupation of Europe and the first Arab-Israeli war. It also covered global politics, with a fair dose of Islam and terror, Africa, a smattering of classical Rome, tomes on how to govern and how to influence people, with a definite bias towards America. I started speed-reading: sometimes a whole book, sometimes not. When desperate, I skipped to the conclusion. My brain gradually inflated to the size of a balloon. A blue balloon. I wonder if this is how Michael Gove, reputedly the most intelligent person in the Shadow Cabinet, feels.

By the time the stack was knee-high (I was still not naked), I was subject to periodic blinding headaches. Globally, I learnt that international liberalism did not happen the way we all predicted after the end of the Cold War. “History” returned, along with struggles for power between nations, liberalism and autocracy, and between Islam and secular cultures. I learnt that China believes that war with the US over Taiwan may “some day be unavoidable”. I decided that if Tory MPs “read only one book this summer” it should be this one: the neo-conservative Robert Kagan's The Return of History and the End of Dreams. I now know that we have bigger problems than the fact that summer was a washout, my children no longer know who I am and black spots float in front of my eyes on a semi-permanent basis.

From these books, a picture emerges of a future Conservative government in which, shockingly, no Cabinet Minister has first-hand military experience and where “politics and diplomacy are both games of bluff”. (You don't say.) This conservatism is powered by the conviction that individuals can be “nudged” into better choices, and that business can change social behaviour. (Hmm.) It would be a government that paid due heed to the veteran politico Norman Fowler's view that a party “which appears disunited, quarrelsome and frankly unpleasant will never win an election”. (Fowler's book, A Political Suicide: The Conservatives' Voyage into the Wilderness, should have been required reading for Labour MPs this summer. It is £14.99 - read it and weep.)

Thanks to my reading, I learnt that Cameron is more of a dog lover than a cat lover; is a believer in social reform; has never had a Muslim to dinner; and uses William Hague as a reminder that you do not begin modernising a party and then change tack. It does not make me want to vote for him - I like cats. At a dinner party with genuine Conservative activists, including my friend the former council candidate, and the Berwick parliamentary candidate, I found myself dropping one geopolitical insight after another geopolitical insight into the conversation. I was the dinner-party guest from Hell. I decide that this is revenge enough.

Wife in the North by Judith O'Reilly is published by Penguin at £7.99. www.wifeinthenorth.com

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