THERE IS, IT SEEMS, ONE big, fat, deliberate lie just inside the front cover of Robert Harris’s book: “Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.”

Pull the other one, Robert. Cherie Blair may have just announced a deal to publish her autobiography, while her husband’s remains in gestation, but one thing is sure: whoever “collaborates” with either of them, it certainly won’t be the best writer they know, their former friend and flag-waver Harris.

The Ghost is a satire, thriller and piece of political vengeance neatly rolled into one. And you can bet that it will remain a far better read than either of the turgid, sanitised, overpriced tomes that our former leader and his missus will turn out.

Harris may have taken pains to insist that Adam Lang, his media-savvy, photogenic, former prime minister and his clever, shrewd, conniving and manipulative wife Ruth are figments of his imagination. But he and we – and the Blairs – may strongly suspect he is having us on. Save it for the libel lawyers, Robert (not that there will be any): Tony and Cherie haunt this book as surely as they will hate it.

The Ghost by Robert Harris

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One other character clearly drawn from life – though Harris has taken great pains to draw a physical portrait so radically different that it is almost an excellent joke in itself – is the late Robin Cook, here kept alive long enough to become the former PM’s nemesis.

Richard Rycart – Cook’s unlookalike alter ego – sacked as Foreign Secretary by Lang and now UN special envoy for humanitarian affairs, accuses his former boss of complicity in war crimes for facilitating the CIA snatch and torture of four British citizens.

The “Ghost ”of the title, whose name with eloquent circumlocution we are never told (Lang calls him “man”, hippy style), has been drafted in to finish off Lang’s memoirs after his predecessor, a long-standing political aide, is found drowned in an apparent suicide.

Harris claims – and this I am sure is true – that he has long wanted to write a book about the relationship of a ghostwriter to the politician whose memoirs he is producing, and found this a way to do both that and involve the British relationship with America.

But it is the Blair experience that not only gave him the opportunity, but also a ready-made plot – the “war crimes allegation” path is already well trodden, but Harris takes it on a twist – as well as the political venom to make his characters really sting.

If Rycart is deliberately elegant and stylish – unlike the comically impish Cook – so the differences Harris has created between Blair and Lang serve to highlight the parallels.

Blair recently showed off his first mobile phone; Lang can’t pay with his credit card because he’s forgotten to activate it. Blair was a would-be rock star at Oxford; Lang a Footlights actor at Cambridge. The thespian sincerity that is Lang’s forte is uncomfortably familiar, as when he issues a routine denunciation of yet another terrorist blast: “You would have thought his own wife and children had been eviscerated.”

And Rycart sets a challenge that could well refer to Blair: “Name me one decision that Adam Lang took as Prime Minister that wasn’t in the interest of the United States of America.” The list of one-sided pro-US decisions is scary – and they were all made by Blair.

Harris has been a ghost in the Labour library all his life, at least since The Making of Neil Kinnock in 1984, his first foray into biography. That was closely followed by Good and Faithful Servant, which showed how Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, invented the powerful spin-doctor role that would one day be taken into a new dimension by Alastair Campbell.

A close friend of Peter Mandelson, Harris was seriously “onside” in the early years of new Labour. But Blair’s closeness to President Bush, and his eager participation in the Iraq war, which Harris fiercely opposed, finally made him fall decisively out of love with a politician he had once admired.

In a memorable piece for The Sunday Times during the 1997 election campaign, Harris, marvelling at Blair’s seeming ability to be all things to all people, asked: “Which of us, I wonder, will be the first to be disappointed?” If Harris himself was not the first, he was certainly not the last Blair enthusiast to feel betrayed; there will be more than a few on the government benches smiling broadly as they tuck into The Ghostin search of skeletons. Even fictious ones.

Harris can insist volubly that Lang’s aide, Amelia Bly, is not modelled on Blair’s aide Anji Hunter, but only in the sense that the real couple were almost certainly not having an affair.

Whatever it does to his relationships with former friends in high places, The Ghost appears to be a diversion in Harris’s own literary career – dashed off at a columnist’s speed rather than laboriously produced after mammoth research, as was particularly evident in his recent forays into Roman history, first with Pompeii and then with Imperium, the first novel in an intended trilogy about Cicero. While Harris’s research is impeccable and his fascination with ancient politics evident, the Cicero book in particular was a wide departure from the thriller style that made his name.

His 1992 novel Fatherland was a global success based on a series of clever conceits: that Nazi Germany had won the Second World War, that Joe Kennedy (JFK’s father) was President and keen on ending a US-Nazi cold war, and that nobody knew what had happened to the Jews. It courted notoriety with a cover – soon withdrawn – which featured the EU flag and Swastika flying together.

Enigma– on the Allied cover-up of the Soviets’ Katyn massacre – and Archangel, in which Stalin’s son emerged as a new totalitarian Russian leader, established his position as a master of the intelligent thriller, tinkering with the fabric of history in fine prose with clever plots. The two Roman books, while well written and intellectually satisfying, have – not least because we know the ending – departed from the genre. And not necessarily for the better.

The Ghost is Harris back on sparkling form, bringing the politics of today alive with a lot more mischief, venom and magic than he applied to those of 2,000 years ago. As he insists, The Ghost is fiction, but it is fiction that feels like fact. And that’s what puts the thrill into “thriller”.

The Ghost by Robert Harris
Hutchinson, £18.99

Robert Harris appears at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on Wednesday October 10 at 6pm
Call 01242 227979
www.cheltenhamfestivals.com

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