A FORMER Labour spin doctor is planning his revenge on government censors who have blocked his diaries by instead publishing a novel based on the inner workings of Downing Street.

The book by Lance Price includes characters who bear a striking resemblance to the four key members of the original new Labour project — Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson.

The parallels range from a troublesome chancellor eager to take the top job, to a bullying spin doctor and the taking of a decision to go to war based on false intelligence.

Last week it emerged that Price, who from 1998 to 2000 worked as deputy to Campbell, then Blair’s communications chief, had been prevented from publishing memoirs of his time at Downing Street.

Sir Andrew Turnbull, the cabinet secretary, branded the book “completely unacceptable”, even though the events described happened five years ago. It is believed to be the first time the government has tried to impose a ban on such a book.

The ban came as Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations in the run-up to the Iraq war, was told by the Foreign Office to cut some passages from his forthcoming book about the diplomatic manoeuvrings that preceded the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Price is not the first former press officer to take revenge on his former Whitehall masters through fiction. Martin Sixsmith published his novel Spin, a satire based on his work as a spin doctor under Stephen Byers, then transport secretary, before Sixsmith was forced out of his job in 2002.

Price’s novel, Time and Fate, to be published later this year, is being billed as combining “an intimate insider’s view of life at No 10 with a mixture of satire and humour”. It features Paul Sinclair, a prime minister constantly needled by his troublesome chancellor.

Sinclair has a worrying teenage son — a reminder of Blair’s son Euan and his brushes with alcohol. The spin doctor in the novel barks instructions at his “master”. Like Campbell, he is a former tabloid newspaper journalist.

At one point he advises the prime minister that rumours of an extra-marital affair may not be bad news because “it might do wonders for your poll ratings, especially among working-class men”.

In the book, ministers also have to cope with a terrorist attack on the London Underground, although this parallel is coincidental — the book was written before the recent bombings.

The novel is set a few years in the future and the characters are not full replicas of Downing Street’s famous names — but the detailed descriptions of meetings could cause some cringing among aides past and present.

The finale may inspire thoughts about Blair’s eventual departure from high office.

The fictional Sinclair leaves Downing Street after deciding that he can no longer cope with the pressure. He calmly walks out of No 10 and disappears without telling anyone where he is going.

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