At some 350,000 words (and there are 2.5 million or so more to come), this is a testing Titan, a cantankerous colossus among political diaries. Tony Benn's were also long, but contained idea(l)s. Alan Clark's were shorter, and much more amusing. Here, both vision and wit are as rare as a radical in Blair's Cabinet. In its earnest candour, this tome takes the genre of political diaries to new heights - or depths.

It is a work of unrelenting ephemera. It opens everything and conceals nothing except, thank goodness, its principals' visits to the lavatory. So if you want a step-by-step exposé of each grinding day of new Labour from 1994-2003, read this. If you like shorthand rather than proper prose, you'll find that too. For a supposedly articulate man, Campbell's writing is clichéd, inarticulate and crass. “Chequers was not my cup of tea” meets “all the time we had this media shit to swim through” or “it was an immediate fucking nightmare”.

The effect is to communicate smothering, dense trees. If there is, or ever was, a wood,

it's not here. There is the spin, of course: “I had to scramble together a usable line.” Otherwise, there is an angry boy inside a powerful man. “I couldn't remember what I wrote in my diary the minute I wrote it. I was always surprised at things that happened, things I said, things other people had said, I just didn't know.” Transparency is good, yes. But it's a question of degree.

The Blair Years: extracts from the Alaister Campbell and Richard Stott
Arrow, £9.99 Buy the book here

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