When Sir Christopher Meyer swore that he would “publish and be damned”, our former man in Washington could have little idea how ferocious that damnation would be as a hurricane of outrage whirled around his memoirs.

Last week the 61-year-old faced calls to resign as chairman of the Press Complaints Commission and was reportedly labelled “a complete prick” by Tony Blair for publishing his autobiography DC Confidential. It provides the most detailed account yet of the thinking inside Downing Street and the White House in the 18 months before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 — although what has really caused upset are his wicked pen portraits.

Slighted ministers, dismissed by Meyer as “political pygmies”, joined a posse of former mandarins in a chorus of disapproval. “Unacceptable,” inveighed Jack Straw, the foreign secretary. “A breach of trust,” declared Lord Armstrong, who led the civil service under Margaret Thatcher. “Damaging to the career civil service,” pronounced Lord Renwick, a former ambassador to Washington. “Snide innuendo,” said a source close to Blair.

The essence of Meyer’s book is that Blair repeatedly missed opportunities to halt the rush to war in Iraq and in so doing may have contributed to the country’s present chaos.

It is Meyer’s case that the prime minister and his team were “seduced” by White House glamour and hesitated to lay down conditions with President George W Bush in exchange for Britain’s symbolically invaluable support for the war.

“We may have been the junior partner in the enterprise but the ace up our sleeve was that America did not want to go it alone,” he writes.

“Had Britain so insisted, Iraq after Saddam (Hussein) might have avoided the violence that may yet prove fatal to the entire enterprise.”

Along the way, Meyer describes with undiplomatic candour some of the most cringe-worthy moments of the leading players, notably Blair’s “awkward trouser moments” with the Bushes, while ladling rich disdain on such ministers as Straw, John Prescott and Geoff Hoon.

Straw, says Meyer, was “someone more to be liked than admired”, who took “a long time to find his feet”.

On a visit to Washington in 1999, he characterises Straw, then home secretary, as “mystifyingly tongue-tied in the unthreatening presence of Janet Reno, the attorney- general, and Louis Freeh, the director of the FBI”.

In questioning whether Meyer should continue as head of the press watchdog after his breach of trust, Straw claimed last week that he was more upset by what had been revealed about early morning briefings in John Major’s Downing Street bedroom. These slightly surreal vignettes were recorded when Meyer was Major’s press secretary.

While Norma Major sat serenely in bed in a nightgown, Meyer recalls, he perched on a bench at the foot of the bed listening to the restless prime minister.

“I invariably arrived as the prime minister was getting dressed, but was always admitted no matter what stage this process had reached . . . Major would prowl the bedroom in his shirt-tails, fulminating about something in the Daily Mail or Sun. Occasionally I was summoned into the ministerial bathroom where, as I spoke, he would discharge some ablution.”

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