It's fast becoming the Mousetrap of the publishing world, a creaky old drama on which nobody can quite bring down the curtain. The New Labour cast is wearily familiar, the plot a matter of record: yet somehow, Power and the People retains the capacity to shock.
This second of four unexpurgated volumes of Alastair Campbell's diaries (a tactfully redacted version was published while Gordon Brown was still in power) covers Tony Blair's first two honeymoon years in power. The author clearly intends it as a monument to achievement, rebutting claims that golden opportunities were wasted in the first parliament; but what leaps off the page is a cautionary tale.
Huge events unfurl, yet one is irresistibly drawn (thanks to Campbell's eye for the absurd) to the smallness beneath: the petty rivalries and vanities of politicians within his own party and others. Half farce, half tragedy, the story hinges on one fatal flaw: the ego "the size of an elephant's arse" said of Clare Short, but true of many others possessed by many senior players. As Blair remarks after one world leaders' lunch: "if people had seen it, they would be terrified these people were running the world."
Some Labour supporters may lack the stomach for this, but it should be required reading for coalition MPs because, despite a sometimes exhausting level of detail, there is still no better minute-by-minute account of what life is like in No 10. With its contempt for the media rivalled only by scorn for colleagues, it is the chronicle of a sour, distrustful political age.
The uncensored diaries were expected to damage Brown, and there are embarrassing anecdotes enough: tales of paranoia and secrecy, and reckless disregard for the damage done in pursuit of personal ambitions. At an EU finance summit, Brown warns Campbell that it would be "very bad" if Blair were seen to succeed in talks where he failed. The diarist is left suspecting "he would rather we lost than have to face headlines saying Blair had saved the day".
Yet such stories (and worse) have been rehashed so often that they no longer surprise; they are balanced by scrupulously recorded flashes of analytical brilliance or shrewdness, which help to explain why Brown's behaviour was tolerated for so long.
The politician who does emerge diminished is Peter Mandelson, portrayed as a vain attention-seeker prone to taking credit for others' actions and exaggerating his importance. There is a toe-curling anecdote about him trying desperately to get invited to Princess Diana's funeral, claiming to be a "personal friend": within months of election Blair fears he is "becoming a liability". While the prime minister obviously valued Mandelson, from these diaries it's hardly clear why. The reader may wonder whether the two men's rivalry or Campbell's irritation with what he calls Mandelson's own "insufferably self-indulgent" memoirs colours his view.
There are few earth-shattering revelations in the new passages, although the accounts of Diana's funeral contain uncomfortable hints of palace pressure on the young Prince William to walk behind her coffin, amid fears the public might otherwise attack Prince Charles. Jack Straw's son Will may also be interested to read that when he was caught, aged 17, buying cannabis in a tabloid sting, it was Campbell who suggested his father "take his son to the cops, get him cautioned". (He was actually arrested.)
For the first time, Campbell also effectively outs himself as the source of the Observer's infamous story suggesting that Brown had "psychological flaws". He also describes more explicitly the tensions in the Blairs' marriage caused by what Cherie sees as her husband's over-reliance on his aide, Anji Hunter. The uncensored Blair, meanwhile, comes across as irreverent prone to impersonating world leaders behind their backs and impatient. He despairs privately of some ministers, concluding that "even the ones we thought were good were not that good". By his third day in office he worries they are losing the initiative.
The question of whether Blair did lose momentum too fast is central to this book, not least because the current government's hyperactivity scheduling big welfare, health and education reforms alongside deep spending cuts reflects a firm belief that New Labour moved too slowly and timidly.
Yet this account of a driven Blair racking up benefit cuts, Bank of England reform, a Northern Ireland peace process, early devolution and a bold but doomed stab at Lab-Lib coalition suggests there was barely space for much more. The clear lesson is that pressures of office drive out thinking time, and that unexpected events or human foibles what Campbell calls the "Peyton Place-ness" of personal Downing Street dramas are the enemies of progress.
No doubt the current No 10 team, criticised for delegating too much, will also ponder Blair's conclusion that "most of our problems have come from when I have let others make decisions", and his resolve not to make that mistake again.
That alarming whiff of self-belief illustrates how many seeds of this government's end are discernible in its beginning. Blair's early skirmish with Iraq (the bombing raids of December 1998) reveals his hawkishness towards Saddam Hussein and his firm view that "whether we think they are in the right place or not" the UK should not withdraw from American-led military action. Brown's unsuitability for leadership is writ large in his inability to work with others; Campbell's aggressively personalised approach to hostile media, ultimately his undoing, is also clear from the start. The irony is that after years of berating journalists for focusing on personality not policy, the full diaries end up neatly demonstrating how crucial personalities can be.
As his exasperated master concludes, the government at this stage "had no real political differences but we had massive egotism". David Cameron, so far, has the opposite: a coalition divided on issues but lacking (Ken Clarke and Vince Cable perhaps excepted) many rogue elephants. The moral of these diaries is to keep it that way.
