Alastair Campbell has said that he removed references to Gordon Brown from his diaries because he hadn’t wanted to hand David Cameron a goldmine.

If the extracts released yesterday are a true guide to the rest of the book, then it is clear that readers, too, have been handed ore of a lower grade.

The story that he chose to whet appetites at the weekend – that Tony Blair considered pre-announcing his resignation in 2002 – is interesting but hardly politically explosive.

Similarly, his account of the build-up to war is full of corroborative detail but light on genuine revelation. We learn that John Reid and John Prescott had looked “physically sick” at the last Cabinet before the invasion but are told that Mr Blair never wavered.

Some of the more diverting passages relate to the former Prime Minister’s relationship with other world leaders. President Bush showed more knowing than many would expect when, after a meeting at which it was agreed to seek a UN mandate for Iraq, he joked with Mr Campbell how he could spin that “Tony flew in and pulled the crazed unilateralist back from the brink”.

Bill Clinton, on the other hand, showed much less tolerance of Mr Blair’s media handling when he phoned Mr Blair in a “total rage” over reports in the British media that he was opposed to a ground war in Kosovo in 1999. “He said it may well play well with the UK media and public but ‘there is a price to pay and you will pay it’.”

Mr Campbell said yesterday that, on reading a draft of the book, Mr Blair had been most worried about what had been said about his colleagues on the world stage, ignoring “vanity points” made by someone who had seen him “in the raw”. With what confidence can the powerful talk to one another if they know that scribblers are taking notes with an eye to a publisher’s advance?

It is the point made by implication yesterday by Mr Brown, who affected magisterial indifference while saying that those in public service should be too busy to keep diaries. We should learn today whether, in Mr Campbell’s case, it was time well spent.

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