Guardian TV reviewer Sam Wollaston nails the inherent worthlessness of David Blunkett’s memoirs:

We’re in 1998 and Blunkett, then education secretary, has been having a go at incompetent teachers and trying to improve standards of numeracy. We see a clip of him being interviewed by a reporter.

“Do you know your times table?” she asks.

“I do know my times table,” he replies, confidently. “I had to learn it rote fashion when I was a child. And it stayed with me ever since. So ’seven sevens are 49′ comes quite naturally.”

“And nine eights?”

“Nine eights … [there's a little pause] … nine eights … [big laugh] … nine eights … [another laugh] … 72.”

He gets there eventually. But to anyone watching, this is a man desperately procrastinating and trying to fill in time, any way he can, while he works out what nine times eight is. He’s probably doing it on his fingers, out of sight of the camera.

Then we hear his diary entry: “An ITN reporter asked me what nine times eight were. Fortunately, I was able to give an immediate and accurate answer.”

He’s Labour’s very own Jeffrey Archer. There was a story a few years back about Archer’s claim that he’d been at Oxford University in 1963 when he’d actually been at the Oxford department of education. Somebody, I think it was Clive James, quipped ‘Jeffrey Archer is the only person who can remember where he wasn’t when Kennedy was shot’.