TONY AND CHERIE: A Special Relationship
by Paul Scott
Sidgwick £17.99 pp304

Looking for a stocking filler for someone you loathe? Buy, then, Lance Price’s diary of what it was like to work for Tony Blair in 10 Downing Street. Trust me, you will not find a book that is more sapping and pointless on so many different levels. I had to get drunk to finish it, but at least I’ve been paid for the job. You might expect someone who worked alongside Alastair Campbell, shovelling out the half truths and the obfuscations and the dissemblings, to have some sort of insight into the process, or to offer up a revelation, of a kind. But nope, not a chance. As diaries go, this is far less Chips Channon than Adrian Mole, age 40 and three quarters.

One of the problems, of course, is that Price was not the pox doctor, he was merely the pox doctor’s clerk. His boss, Campbell, is mentioned on almost every page, but sadly rarely seen, never brought fully into the light. Sure, we discover that everyone thought Mo Mowlam was utterly useless and that No 10 was a bit wary of No 11 and that John Prescott seems quite a decent bloke, if a bit dim from time to time. But we knew all that, didn’t we? More pertinently, we learn nothing about Price. We discover that, upon starting work at No 10, he bought a new suit and shoes. But we are not told why he wanted to leave a perfectly respectable position as an average-ish BBC political correspondent, to whore it for new Labour. Was it conviction? Was it a desire to be close to the heart of power? Was it just money? And how did he feel about lying (Price calls them “fibs”) to journalists when he had so recently been one? Did it bother him? Apparently not. And then again, having procured the trust of the prime minister and Campbell and the cabinet, what motivated him, in the end, to dish the dirt by writing this book, to be so brazenly disloyal? The horrible Peter Mandelson was required to resign during Price’s tenure. It is intimated that the two men — both homosexuals — were reasonably close; they got on well, they may even have been friends. But his passing provokes not even the most fleeting passage of regret or sympathy or contemplation. Price, it seems, is made of vapour. A nonentity who has told us nothing and who seems to have felt nothing.

Paul Scott, meanwhile, has produced a book that should make us all laugh for many years to come. It is a thoroughly professional, well-written and copiously researched analysis of Tony and Cherie Blair’s strange and disquieting relationship, and the good bits are all about Cherie. She hates the royals, but not half as much as they hate her. There is an especially wonderful vignette of Cherie bumping into the Princess Royal for the first time: “Shaking hands with the formidable Anne, Cherie, seeking to dispense with formality, invited the princess to call her ‘Cherie’. Anne, her face a picture of cool disdain, replied: ‘Actually, let’s not go that way. Let’s stick to Mrs Blair, shall we?’” Terrific stuff, and there’s plenty more — Cherie’s loathing for the royal corgis, her insuperable thirst for money, her weirdo new-age hangers-on, her presumption and ambition and her determination to screw a discount on purchases by dint of the fact that she is the prime minister’s wife. Hell, you can take the girl out of Liverpool . . .

And we see the Blairs at home, too. Scott quotes a friend of the family who had popped round to see the pair on an evening when Tony was due to attend an important Commons vote. Blair rose to leave for the vote, but, “Cherie was telling him she wanted him to attend to some pretty trivial thing to do with the kids . . . she was basically telling him that she was too busy with the work she had brought home to take care of it. Tony was trying to explain that he needed to go, but she was determined that he should see to the kids, not her. I thought to myself, I know she has an important job and everything, but he’s only the f***ing prime minister.”

Priceless, if you will excuse the pun.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First prices of £15.29 (Lance Price) and £16.19 on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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