Over the past month, like ghouls in a fairground ride, political ghosts have been leaping out at Gordon Brown. Lord Levy and his terrifying coiffure have popped up in the Mail on Sunday. Cherie Blair's banshee wail has echoed across the Times and the Sun. And John Prescott's thuggish grin has been stalking him in the Sunday Times. Revenge in paper form, their memoirs are giving the prime minister nightmares.
Publishers who have forked out tens of thousands for the rights, and the newspapers that are serialising them, are making the usual claims for this latest crop of books. Certain stock phrases are always used: the ideal memoir must "lift the lid on power", preferably "for the first time". It needs to be "full and frank", "explosive", "startling" and, of course, "deeply personal". It can never be bitter - only "riveting and candid". The government will be "rocked", or at least "blown off course" by what they contain.
Yet what really unites all three of the latest books is an aura of pettiness. Between them Cherie, Prescott and Levy were involved in something significant, the invention and success of New Labour, but they manage to make it look small. Their pens record a catty world of backbiting and name-calling, where pride and gossip count for more than anything else. Carole Caplin did (or did not) give Tony a bare massage. Prescott definitely once called Blair "a little shit". Cherie feared that the Queen's servants at Balmoral might unpack her contraceptives (or "unmentionables", as this good Catholic calls them). Lord Levy feels unloved by the man whose election victories he funded. And everyone thinks Brown is weird and probably bonkers.
All three books are instant and shallow and will soon be forgotten, if they sell at all, and yet they are also addictive in the way gossip can be. They tell us, as if we did not know already, that politicians, their families and their advisers, are insecure and jealous people and that their careers rarely end happily.
Politicians are always accusing journalists of ignoring the big things that matter to report Westminster rumours. But these books show that the rumours are what obsess people on the inside, too.
It would be easy to claim that the latest shabby books are worse than their predecessors - just as it is true to claim that authors are quicker than ever to put their stories in print. But very few political memoirs have ever really broken out of the insular world of plotting and chit-chat. Only the controversies and the players change down the generations.
The past 12 prime ministers have all written long accounts of their time in power (as no prime minister before that ever did), but few have lasted. Winston Churchill, who was a good writer and even won a Nobel prize for literature, is all but unread today. Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan's multi-volume boasts now appear laughable. Even Margaret Thatcher's memoirs have now been pushed to the furthest corner of the modern Conservative's bookshelf.
Denis Healey wrote a great political autobiography and perhaps, in a different way, so did Nigel Lawson in his technical record of the economics of Thatcherism - but almost always what sticks in the mind and what people want to read is the tittle-tattle. Alan Clark and Henry "Chips" Channon (the brilliant 1930s Tory diarist) were bit players in government but were made giants by their diaries. Clark's books are still on sale. No one looks at Lawson.
A few years ago, this paper printed extracts from one of the best accounts so far of the Blair years, Christopher Meyer's DC Confidential. It contained long and detailed descriptions of planning ahead of the Iraq war but what attracted all the attention was Meyer's claim that Blair's dark-blue jeans were "ball-crushingly tight". Nothing else from the book is remembered now.
David Blunkett's diaries contain hundreds of turgid pages describing the making and unmaking of policy - but he lacked the sensation of Prescott's book, which was his implausible confession to bulimia. Prescott's publishers (and his ghostwriter, the man who also serves Wayne Rooney, Hunter Davies) must have hugged themselves with glee at that. No one has yet found time to discuss Prescott's views on the Iraq war or transport policy (though both also get space in his book).
Can he have expected anything else? The reasons why politicians put themselves through such a shaming process are tangled and may involve a desire to settle scores or "put the record straight" and a hunger for attention after the world's gaze has moved on. But the strongest strand is surely obvious: it must be money. Blair is reputed to be getting £4.6m for his memoirs and, though Prescott's advance was much smaller than that, it was more than £100,000, enough to ease the transition from a deputy prime minister's salary. Cherie's thirst for income is no secret, either - and books can lead to well-paid television series and newspaper serialisations.
But no author will admit to writing only for money and - in Lord Levy's case, at least - that can hardly be the main motive. All of them are also driven by a curious vanity, which (considering how demeaning the process is) cannot quite amount to pride. Journalists comb their books for some political explosive, the single story that can detonate a government's collapse. But such dynamite almost never exists. Meanwhile, the details the books seek to correct or the justifications they itch to see on the record pass most readers by. At the end of their careers, politicians want to explain where and why it all went wrong.
This is certainly true of Prescott's book, which, in a touching, slightly incoherent way, is true to its subject: full of fight and misunderstanding. He feels hurt by the way he is seen, a punching, womanising mascot of old Labour, and talks engagingly of his battle with the English language.
But it doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know about the government. He points out that he "told Tony to sack Gordon" - but it is old news that Blair considered doing so. He tells readers that Brown is "frustrating, annoying, bewildering, prickly" - hardly a surprise and, in its way, rather kind. And he mentions that Blair wants to be Europe's first president, which is no secret.
The tie that binds all three of the latest books is Gordon Brown, looming over everyone like a scary uncle. This is what makes their publication now, when things have turned so nasty for him, such a talking point. All three authors claim that it is a coincidence that their books have come out while the prime minister is in such trouble. But authors always say such things - and anyway, Cherie's book has come out much sooner than expected. The reality is that the sharpest political books always arrive when a government is on the slide and these ones are no exception. If Brown had been 20 points ahead in the polls, rather than 20 points behind, would they have dared to be so rude - and would we have been so interested?
For Brown, these books must be particularly painful, since their tone contradicts everything he believes politics should be about. A year ago, he brought out his own book, Courage: Eight Portraits, a lumpy series of unoriginal tributes to unquestionable heroes, such as Nelson Mandela, that caught the mood of the hour. Politics, for a moment, had become serious - the Spectator magazine even seriously suggested that readers should take Courage on holiday as an "ideal beach read".
This summer, they will be reading about Brown's less courageous side, in Cherie's autobiography Speaking For Myself, which drips slow poison on to the prime minister's reputation. As with Prescott, she reveals no fatal secrets, just bilious digs. Brown, she says, was jealous that Tony Blair was "a family man" and thought he should get married to become prime minister (a nasty kick at Sarah Brown). The chancellor, she writes, also "rattled the keys" to Downing Street to encourage her husband to leave.
Cherie knows well enough that Downing Street's front door does not have a lock and needs no keys, just a challenger bold enough to call time. But like Lord Levy (Blair believed Brown to be a "liar" who could not beat David Cameron) and Prescott (Blair was scared of Brown but refused to make way for him), she is well aware that her comments will hurt him. That, after all, is part of the point.
This was true, too, of the late Tory years, when John Major faced assault by autobiography from Margaret Thatcher. But some things have changed since then. Once it was cabinet ministers who wrote books, but few manage to attract publishers these days. Norman Fowler was the author of the comically titled Ministers Decide (to which cruel colleagues replied: "But you didn't"). But his modern equivalent - say, Geoff Hoon - would struggle to make it into print if he tried to write his book. Sir Menzies Campbell did get published, but his autobiography stands at 49,155 in amazon.co.uk's sales' ranking.
A public that distrusts politics and politicians prefers to read diaries and the accounts of officials. Diaries feel more authentic, even when they are not.
Alastair Campbell is the prime example and though his book was filleted of controversy it still captures more than any other recent work the tone of the Blair government. The diaries of his deputy, Lance Price, do the same.
Strangely, Price was attacked for writing his book five years and one general election after leaving his job and, along with Meyer, had to face a pompous inquiry by MPs. No one seems to have turned on Campbell in the same way and no one seems to object to books by political spouses.
Perhaps the old barriers of restraint that saw civil servants keep out of the public eye are falling away. The recent trio of memoirs (a term politicians prefer to autobiography, since it sounds so much more elegant and reflective) have come out at breakneck speed, while Jonathan Powell's serious book on Northern Ireland, published in March, must have been finished by Christmas, just six months after he left office. But Thatcher's books came out while Major was still in power.
To hold political office in Britain is to be assaulted on all sides by rivals and criticism, in a system that encourages competition and aggressive rivalry. The stories politicians tell when power slips away are more justification and jealousy than real history, but the bitterness is real. The trick, for publishers and journalists, is to tease out the anger and skip the rest.
If Brown's abbreviated sleep allows time for nightmares, one must be of the memoirs still to come. Ken Livingstone? Peter Mandelson? As for the unexpurgated Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair, their promise never to embarrass a Labour prime minister in power may be one of Brown's motives for hanging on. At least it will give Brown something to live for after Downing Street: his own memoir. Revenge.
