I found a second hand copy of The Blairs and Their Court by Francis Beckett and David Hencke in my local Oxfam shop. A few pages and in it’s rather like a companion piece to Christopher Hitchens’ broadside on the Clintons, No One Left to Lie to, or at least it seems to have ambitions in that direction.

It’s certainly a page-turner, despite the sometimes flat tone of the writing; there’s a eyebrow raising passage every two pages. How about this from page 12, on Blair’s school days at Fettes, “the Eton of the North”:

When he became Labour leader in 1994, he very quickly asked Fettes not to release information about him. In particular, Blair’s A-level grades were to be regarded as a state secret. The present writers looked at the Fettes old pupils’ website and e-mailed several of his contemporaries - and the next time we consulted the website, we found that all e-mail addresses had been stripped out; there was a note saying this had been done because of a ‘regrettable security leak’.

Blair, it seems, was a bit of a scamp at Fettes. He and two friends were “three boys who always pushed disobedience to the limit but never quite overstepped it, and were thorns in the side of masters and prefects alike”. He eventually pushed his head of house, RJ Roberts, and the headmaster Ian McIntosh too far and only narrowly avoided the ultimate sanction (from page 16):

Somehow, Blair’s careful brinksmanship went wrong just a few months before he was due to take his A-levels, and it seemed certain that he would be expelled in disgrace. There is some mystery about exactly what his crime was. Mr Roberts has written a six-page account of his dealings with the future prime minister and deposited it with his will. His solicitor has instructions that, on Mr Roberts’ death, one of the two copies should be sent to the then headmaster of Fettes and the other to the archives centre ot Churchill College, Cambridge. Until then the contents remain secret.

Da Vinci Code, eat your heart out. How tantalising is that?

I’m only up to page 57 and so far, every box has been ticked, every suspicion confirmed, every prejudice reinforced and every button pushed. Ace book.