Don't go reading modern political memoirs in a heatwave. Your jaw falls open all the time, and mosquitoes fly in. Stick to Jilly Cooper for raunch and emotional dysfunction, and Healey, Jenkins and the big boys for insight into government. The witterings of minor figures - Edwina Currie, Alan Clark - are reasonably entertaining, and Clark indeed threw odd beams of light into the broom cupboards of power. But the current outbreak of Memoir Wars is different: quick on the draw, savagely disloyal, dangerously close to the centre.

They gaily splatter mud, blood and vomit over the incumbent leader as he struggles with economic and global tension. Raking in the millions, smirking from the sidelines, they shoot off their slack mouths: a Deputy Prime Minister, a confidant fundraiser and, topping them all, a Caesar's wife.

Snipe, snarl, snigger: Lord Levy says Tony doesn't think Gordon can win, and insinuates that the Blairs were in it for money and fame (“Look at what they've done since he's stopped being Prime Minister and answer the question yourself”). Cherie says Levy “knows nothing” and that weird Gordon could win, provided genius Tony advises him. She also lets it be leaked that she toned down her criticisms of Mr Brown so that, whenever she does stick the knife in, we know to add 30 per cent. Meanwhile, John Prescott brags that he called Tony “a little shit” and urged him to sack Gordon, while being the “honest broker” between them. Which puts a whole fresh nuance on the word “honest”, as the stout broker spills the beans (when not gobbling them with condensed milk).

Because, of course, such memoirs are nothing without intimate agonies: neatly spatchcocked and self-served with lashings of smugness. Lord Levy “warned” Tony about being massaged by foxy Carole; Cherie says it was her idea. John Prescott has, thank God, no insight to offer. But reveal, preen, rake in the money! Think Heat and Hello!, not duty and service. Mrs Blair now gaily reveals Leo did have the MMR vaccine; at the time this fact was kept secret on principle, despite the falling take-up of MMR. But principle and privacy are marketable. Public reassurance isn't.

The truth about Tony and Gordon

Cherie Blair reveals her husband is advising Gordon Brown but says he did not trust him enough to stand down early

• 'The problem with me and Gordon is nothing personal'

• Cherie Blair: motherhood, makeovers and making ends meet – my life in Downing Street

• Cherie Blair: the secrecy and sadness behind a remarkable memoir

Multimedia

• Full coverage: Cherie Blair autobiography

BACKGROUND

• My complex life in Downing Street

• Secrecy and sadness behind memoir

• Leo: my miracle baby at 45 (and yes, he did have the MMR jab)

• The night I hated Tony

BACKGROUND

• Miscarriage: ‘I'm afraid the baby's dead, Mrs Blair'

• The Queen and I: relations with the royals

• Cherie Blair's face-off with Campbell over Caplin

• Peter Foster and the ‘scandal' that never was

Stories are buffed up and given royal icing: Mrs Blair claims Leo was conceived because it was embarrassing to pack contraceptive “equipment” for Balmoral, where servants unpack your sponge bag. Well, I can confide to any confused males that there is no known “equipment” too large to go in a handbag. Which servants don't touch. But hell, it's a good story. And the memoirs must be served quick and hot, before poor Mr Brown implodes and everyone's baying for pictures of little Milibands.

You may think me unkind and prim. But the tendency to use autobiography unreflectively and with spite is depressing, if you take either literature or politics seriously. Do they know, these people, how the polite publishers and serialisation buyers crow and giggle as they lay out blurbs and headlines? Do they know with what superhuman effort such grown-ups refrain from pointing out how bad the writers make themselves look? One tiny example: Mrs Blair relates a conversation with Princess Margaret. She introduces the minister Chris Smith and his partner. The Princess, confused, says: “Partner for what?” And instead of saying “his life partner” Cherie says: “For sex, Ma'am!” Crass, homophobic. If I introduced her as Mr Blair's sexual resource, how would she like it?

And does she grasp how badly her husband comes across in her memoir? Pushed about by Campbell and Millar, forever panicking, willing to publicise his still-bleeding wife's miscarriage to stop the press speculating about Iraq. And when she says that his financial attitude is “I just want to do what's right and somehow or other we'll sort it out” it has a horrible echo in his unreflective, underplanned plunge into Iraq.

Her book is shot through with financial anxiety, understandably given her obsession with not becoming poor again (fat chance). She speaks bitterly about her breadwinning role as wife of a man earning a mere £187,000 plus use of two free houses; she defends her graspingness without total success. I still don't know why, when the comparative stranger Peter Foster e-mailed that “his company” would pick up the £4,000 accountancy costs over the Bristol flats, she failed to e-mail back: “Oh no you won't!” A QC? A judge? Even journalists know that there are no free lunches.

I have defended Mrs Blair, though not recently. I endorse her stand on penal policy. But she has let us down so often that the head sinks into the hands (which at least solves the problem of the ever-dropping jaw). One nasty little aside finally finished her off for me, when she meanly said that Sarah Brown has “four people working for her while I only had two”. A puzzled Downing Street denies this: Mrs Brown actually has less back-up than Cherie. But it reminds us that the present incumbents are not super-rich, any more than the Blairs were; and that gentle Sarah Brown, a seasoned professional woman and mother of two young sons (one with cystic fibrosis) uses her time in Downing Street quite differently.

She tends her family, runs her charity and supports Third World midwives. I doubt she's having much fun right now, with an exhausted and much-insulted husband; I doubt that a posse of dress designers, Eurotrash villa-owners and slinky masseuses on the make are there to fawn on her. But on the other hand Mrs Brown has not exposed herself as a vain, self-regarding, shallow-thinking viper. And probably never will. That thought might cheer her up.

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