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Should David Blunkett ever find himself short of a guide dog, the author of this timely biography might fill in nicely; touchingly loyal, eager to please, skilled in avoiding tricky areas. This is the book at the centre of the home secretary’s resignation, vehicle for those incendiary comments about colleagues — Patricia Hewitt doesn’t think “strategically”; acolytes of Gordon Brown are “slime from under stones” and the rest. It has also pulled off the unprecedented feat of both canonising its subject and expediting his fall from grace. Its sales will be borne on the wings of dazzling publicity and — here’s the best bit — it was published 10 days before Christmas, a perfect stocking-filler for the season of forgiveness. How lucky can a wet-nosed helpmate get?

The more you read, the more you wonder how on earth Blunkett became so fatally entangled with Kimberly Quinn, a seductress who makes Mae West look demure. They became lovers in January 2002. “The socialist meets the socialite,” he quipped, but that was to understate the awesome mismatch. Although the attraction on his part is obvious, what drew a pouting political groupie to the third most powerful politician in the land is anyone’s guess. We learn that his interests are quiet and contemplative (walks in Derbyshire, poetry, radio drama) though with Quinn he enjoyed a social whirl of parties and receptions as they dared the world to comment. It is this reckless disregard for consequences, apparent in that betrayal of colleagues, which is so out of character for a wily operator. Pollard means to exonerate him at every turn, but the image of a home secretary demented by love while drafting the new Terrorism Act, ordering identity cards, and advising immigrants to speak English at home, will thrill the liberal establishment that thought him bonkers all along.

Since when did serious socialists consort with millionaire It-girls? Since new Labour, of course, with its warring Methodist roots and latter-day love of cash and celebrity. Twenty years ago, a woman like Quinn (rich, flighty, employed by a right-wing magazine) would have been deeply suspicious to a old-style Labourite, not so much a social asset as an embarrassment at conference fringe meetings. We’re told that Blunkett hated Derry Irvine for his aloofness; we can only imagine how the man who took left-over groceries into the office for lunch squared the circle with Kimberly’s hooray social set.

There is plenty here for those interested in Labour’s modernisation project — the ousting of Militant, U-turns on unilateralism and the block vote, during all of which Blunkett was an influential member of his party’s National Executive Committee, one who infuriated his leader Neil Kinnock by trying to be in both camps. Once the Bennite leader of Sheffield’s loony-left council, he somehow abandoned the faith while garnering a reputation — rubber-stamped here — for principled consistency.

But in a cabinet of middle-class professionals, he is the genuine article: a blind lad from a poor home, shoddily treated. Sent away to a harsh school at four, he had a childhood fraught with separations, isolation and broken bones as he tried to ride his bike, climb trees, play cricket with a ball with bells inside. At 12, he lost his father in a gruesome accident at work (he fell into a vat of boiling water) and at his secondary school in Shropshire had to fight to take O-levels and have two clean shirts a week. If he is arrogant as a politician, as Pollard allows, it is a quality without which he would have been sunk. In 1970, his prospective in-laws viewed the blind clerical officer as a poor prospect for their daughter; but he married Ruth anyway and suffered 20 years of a “joyless” domesticity. (Joyless? What about their three sons?) His solace was the absorbing, incestuous, wheeler-dealing of local politics: in the council chamber he wasn’t the invalid, he was the star. Quinn was the first person for whom he risked the fruits of that unflagging ambition. But Pollard gives us more about the guide dogs’ arthritis than how the former, and one assumes long-suffering Mrs B feels about that. If this is not an authorised biography, as claimed, it certainly reads like one.

Because of his history, Blunkett lives in a world where all mountains can be climbed, and impossibilities surmounted — and where a lover who refuses to leave her husband seems a good bet for a rose-ringed future. Pollard does not explore this capacity for selective amnesia, perhaps because he shares it. “His attempt to build a normal relationship with Quinn was perhaps doomed from the start. They could see each other no more than one or two evenings a week and one weekend a month.” Well, that and the small matter of her being somebody else’s wife. In Blunkett’s case it was the denial of a chronic sentimentalist; in his biographer’s it is a bizarre omission.

His Blunkett is fearless, “a real human being”. How can a blind man run a paper factory of a department like the Home Office? With an intimate reliance on his officials who guide him everywhere and make recordings of documents unavailable in Braille to which he listens at double speed. You can see that his personal warmth and easy emotional attachments, a survival mechanism at work, would leave him pitifully vulnerable in love; the lethal combination of neediness and hubris has reduced a survivor to what Pollard describes as a “broken man”.

How much is his blindness to blame for the mess? Had he observed Quinn’s flirtatious manner, her expert beguiling of men, even her girly clothes, he might have got her number quicker. Although most readers will be drawn to the hastily added final chapter of this book, its account of a 35-year political career is a far better clue to the man than his calamitous affair. It was politics, with its ego-boosting profile and comradeship, that redeemed David Blunkett all those years ago, and it is politics, not hot Tory chicks in high heels, that will save him again.

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