Gordon Brown has had the last laugh. Of all the familiar cast of characters in the Alastair Campbell diaries, it is Mr Brown who, paradoxically, comes out best, or, perhaps, least worst.

The rest – TB (Tony Blair), CB (his wife Cherie), Anji (Hunter, Blair’s gatekeeper), Fiona (Millar, Campbell’s partner), Peter (Mandelson) and Carole (Caplin, Cherie’s lifestyle guru) – are portrayed as being in highly charged and frequently fractious relationships.

However, Mr Campbell’s decision to remove many of the references to the Blair-Brown tensions, so as not to give the Tories ammunition, has done the new Prime Minister a big favour. Mr Brown remains a brooding presence, worrying, largely sensibly, about the strategic implications of any situation, and, increasingly, a threat. But Mr Brown is lucky. Specific stories about his strong words with Mr Blair – as in the full version – would have left a very different impression.

The 794 pages of “extracts”, with four more volumes to come, are a fascinating, absorbing read, even at a five-hour canter yesterday. So much has already been written about the Blair years that the Campbell diaries are unlikely to alter existing assessments radically. Rather, they provide much corroborative detail: for example, about “Diana week” in September 1997, which is more sympathetic to Buckingham Palace than implied by the film The Queen, and about Kosovo, Afghanistan and the Iraq war.

There are many colourful anecdotes and indiscretions, not least about meetings with foreign leaders. Like Mr Blair, Mr Campbell gets on well with both presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, discussing with the latter how they each handled alcoholism. Mr Campbell does not hold back from discussing Mr Blair’s wary relations with Rupert Murdoch and The Sun.

Like most vivid diarists, Mr Campbell is much more interesting on personalities than policy (always a lacuna for him). The picture that emerges may not be the one he intended: a feuding, highly strung bunch. Quite a lot of people will feel let down. Carole Caplin makes her first appearance early on, in September 1994, and you can tell she is going to be trouble.

This is court politics as it was known from the 15th to the 18th centuries: a battle for access and favour. Mr Campbell goes to dinner with Philip Gould and his wife, Gail Rebuck, whose Random House has published the diaries. She wonders “whether Philip and I had ever had a discussion that did not cover TB, GB, PM and their varying relationships. The answer is probably not, at least none that last more than a minute or two.”

Policy appears as largely a personal matter, of who rather than what, of Mr Brown’s determination to keep tight control of decisions on tax and the euro.

The Campbell diaries present Mr Blair himself as fallible, often overconcerned with image, but decisive when it mattered, aware of the big issues. There is little sense of what Mr Blair wanted to achieve, with much about positioning and messages, but nothing about ideology. There is no discussion of the meaning of new Labour, the Third Way or public service reform. The late Alan Clark, Campbell’s old friend, would have been pleased. He has a lively and entertaining heir.

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