Tony’s Ten Years: Memories of the Blair Administration
By Adam Boulton
Pocket Books £8.99, 402 pages
FT Bookshop price: £7.19

A political journalist since the later Thatcher era, Adam Boulton takes the speeches and events of Blair’s final 100 days in 2007 as a frame for his sympathetic analysis of the defining achievements of Blair’s “administration”.

Boulton denies being interested in the “partisan plotting” of Blair and his most trusted aide Anji Hunter, whom Boulton married in 2006. But his recollection of the Blair era has plenty of depth without being academic, which makes for an engaging read, spritzed with gossipy asides.

His balanced verdicts cover initiatives that failed, or could have worked better, as well as successes such as Blair’s involvement in achieving peace in Northern Ireland.

Although Boulton considers the decade’s big policy issues, he also throws in a slightly navel-gazing assessment of “feral” media relations and Blair’s “corrosive” relationship with Brown.