George Bush's holiday reading has been disrupted by a terrible fire in his personal library. The president was particularly upset because both books were completely destroyed, and he hadn't even finished colouring in one of them.

Ah, the old jokes are the best. But as the world's leaders head for their villas, dachas, farms and private islands, what political books should they be packing alongside the suntan lotion and nuclear launch codes?

Margaret Thatcher famously wished for nothing more than "the latest Jeffrey Archer" on the beach; a couple of years ago Tony Blair went for a more serious option: George Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England, the classic history of how within years of a landslide victory a once mighty party disintegrated, crumbled and never again held office.

So what's hot this summer? Bill Clinton's My Life shows that size isn't everything: neither the scale of the advance nor the length of the book can cover up the weaknesses in the narrative and annoying, Bubba style.

Political autobiography works best when the author is fired up with bitterness and desire for revenge. Bill is neither bitter nor vengeful; he seems to like every world leader and to save his vitriol only for his rightwing enemies. Bill's problem is that, contrary to Enoch Powell's dictum, his political career has ended in success. He is more popular with huge sections of the American population than ever. If they could have him for president he would beat Bush, Kerry and even his wife, hands down.

One new book being seriously studied in the White House, Downing Street and elsewhere is Stanley Greenberg's The Two Americas. The Ragin' Cajun, James Carville, claims it is the most important book on US politics for more than 40 years.

Greenberg's central thesis is that the Democrats' overwhelming desire to win the election leaves them without "a narrative for America and without an aspiration for real hegemony".

The book asks some serious questions about Kerry's strategy, but its main interest lies in what it says, between the lines, about New Labour in the UK.

Greenberg is a close friend and ally of Philip Gould, who has been part of Blair's inner circle for a decade. Greenberg goes as far as to cite Antonio Gramsci in support for his argument that the Democrats must win not just the election but the hegemonic mood of the nation.

Let me be the first to predict a revival of interest in the works Gramsci. It's time to dust down those well-thumbed Lawrence & Wishart editions of The Prison Diaries.

Now out in paperback, fully updated, is Peter Riddell's Hug Them Close, which takes its title from Bill Clinton's advice to Tony Blair on the Republicans' victory in 2000. This is a great book, dripping with vignettes and anonymous quotes so transparent you can guess most of their sources.

Riddell's point is that, with the exception of Edward Heath, all British prime ministers have had closeness to the US as a central goal of foreign policy. Blair is no different from Wilson, Churchill or Thatcher in this; he is simply behaving as British prime ministers are supposed to behave.

Blair gave the game away ever so slightly, however, when he remarked to Labour MPs in February 2003: "People say that you are doing this because the Americans are telling you to do it. I keep telling them that it's worse than that: I believe in it."

If you want a book to read by the pool and you don't care whether it gets wet or covered in ice cream, try Alastair Campbell by Peter Oborne and Simon Walters.

It is supposed to be the biography of a well-known journalist who went on to work as a press adviser to Tony Blair; what you get is a 360-page vomiting of bitterness and rage by two rightwing hacks who loathe the Labour party and all its works and whose book throws any pretence at objectivity out of the pedalo well before you reach deep water.

They present Campbell as part Rasputin, part Goebbels, part Svengali, and descend into grumbling and chuntering about the Labour government like two old drunks on a park bench. It's so bad it's hilarious.

Honourable mentions go to Tristram Hunt's Building Jerusalem, a huge history of the modern city - though you may want to wait for the paperback to appear in time for next year's hols - and Jo-Anne Nadler's Too Nice to be a Tory, a personal reflection on life as a Young Conservative. Will she be the Conservative answer to John O'Farrell?

There are two new biographies of Tony Blair, one by the FT's Philip Stephens, which was written for the US market (and it shows), the second by the rightwing writer and headmaster Antony Seldon, who, the blurb promises, "rejects the constraints of formal biography". What constraints are those, then? Perspective? Objectivity? Seldon's pop psychology tells us more about him than his subject. It will be remaindered this side of Christmas, that's my tip.

If you really want to relax and get away from it all, try The 9/11 Commission Report, out now and only £6.99. The findings reveal confusion and panic at the heart of the US air defences as some pilots were scrambled without ammunition, others assumed the Russians were attacking and air traffic controllers tried to locate aeroplanes that had already crashed. Perhaps you would be better off with the latest Jeffrey Archer.

· Paul Richards is a former chairman of the Fabian Society and a current member of the Fabian Executive Committee. He was a member of the Fabian Monarchy Commission, which reported in 2003, and he recently published Tony Blair: In His Own Words