THE CHANGE OF OCCUPANCY in No10 Downing Street has produced a more interesting crop of books about the former Prime Minister than the new one. The most hyped of the year was The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries (Hutchinson, £25/ offer £22.50). Initial reactions largely depended on what people felt about Campbell and his boss — and were therefore often hostile.

But many who went on to read the diaries had to concede that — despite the omissions about Blair/Brown relations and other sensitive topics — the diaries are well written and often revealing, not least about the insecurities of their author. The entries for the week in September 1997 after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, are one of the most gripping and balanced accounts of those endlessly discussed few days.

Anthony Seldon, with Peter Snowdon, has filled in many of the gaps in the Campbell account in his Blair Unbound (Simon & Schuster, £25/ £22.50), based on exhaustive researches by himself and his assistants. It is the most successful of his three volumnious books on the Major and Blair eras. Like Sir Martin Gilbert on Churchill, Seldon uses a narrative approach, with lots of incident — notably on the Blair/Brown arguments — which can be exhausting, with one row, or summit, after another. The big picture is sometimes elusive, and there is too little analysis. He offers, however, the striking and unfashionable argument that Blair became his own man and achieved more in his third term, after his 2005 election victory, than before.

To complement the feuding in Campbell and Seldon, the best insider account of what Blair tried to achieve comes from Sir Michael Barber, the former head of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit. Instruction to Deliver: Tony Blair, the Public Services and the Challenge of Achieving Targets (Politicos, £19.99/£17.99) explains the hows and whys of Blair's public service reforms in a lively version that will be as indispensable to understanding the Blair years as Nigel Lawson's The View from Number Eleven is for the Thatcher era.

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By contrast, Gordon Brown has been ill-served so far. Francis Beckett's short biography, Gordon Brown: Past, Present and Future (Haus, £10.99/£9.49) is slight, and often naive, with little real grasp of policymaking or how the Blair Government functioned. It can be summed up as “how our hero grappled with the wicked Blairites”.

So far, the best account of Mr Brown remains Robert Peston's Brown's Britain, produced in early 2005, even though it is essentially the Ed Balls version of life at the Treasury, supplemented by James Naughtie's portrait in The Rivals.

The Leader of the Opposition has fared better. Cameron: The Rise of the New Conservative (HarperPerennial, £18.99/£17.09) by my Times colleague Francis Elliott and James Hanning provides many insights into the privileged background and the motivations of David Cameron. The authors underline the hard ambition and calculation behind the surface charm, raising fascinating questions about what Cameron might be like as Prime Minister.

Politicians are not held in high esteem and are subject to a coruscating polemic in The Triumph of the Political Class (Simon & Schuster, £18.99/ £17.09) by the journalist Peter Oborne. His thesis is that we now have a class of full-time politicians cut off not only from their own supporters but from ordinary people.

As often, Oborne goes 20 per cent too far. At times, the political class is almost synonymous with the Blairites, even though many of the faults he describes, such as disdain for institutions such as universities and local government, can be dated to the Thatcher era. Nonetheless, he makes a powerful and persuasive case that politicians have accorded themselves privileged treatment over their pay, pensions and outside interests.

Much less noticed than Oborne, but read by at least two of the Cabinet is Politics and the People: A History of British Democracy since 1918 (Atlantic £25/£22.50) in which the political historian Kevin Jeffreys examines how politically interested, and involved, we are. While forms of political participation have changed over the decades, the underlying levels of involvement have not.

There was no golden age of active citizens. There has always been a high level of scepticism about politicians and a low level of activity, whether in parties or pressure groups. Anyone who claims that there is now a crisis in democracy, and that politicians have got worse, should remember that it has all been said before, many times.

As a reminder of broader conflicts, there was also Rajiv Chandrasekaran's widely praised Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone (Bloomsbury, £12.99/ £11.69) about the US's disastrous mishandling of Iraq in 2003-04. It is a world away from the court feuding of the Campbell diaries.

Bestsellers 2007

1 A Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
Abacus, £12.99
Perennial favourite from the most iconic political figure of recent times. Much of it written in prison.

2 Fantasy Island by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson
Constable, £7.99

3 What's Left by Nick Cohen
Fourth Estate, £12.99

4 Londonistan by Melanie Phillips
Gibson Square, £8.99

5 The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
Penguin, £9.99

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