Well, if you're looking for Catholic resonances, Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited works better. Both are composed as flashbacks from an opening trigger (Ryder's regiment arriving at Brideshead; McBride climbing out of a neighbour's kitchen window to evade photographers). In both the narrator drifts into a career for which he had no previous training (Ryder becomes a painter after redecorating Brideshead; McBride starts as a VAT expert and ends as a spin doctor). The role of Sebastian Flyte is shared between Ed Balls and Ed Miliband (and during the story they swap roles of unreliable narcissist and teddy bear).

McBride claims he rose through his ability to draft concise reports and effective speeches. I believe him. He has a brisk, economical approach. The book is well-written. But not even McBride's mother would rate his writing higher than Waugh's. Power Trip is more vulgar, chatty rather than witty, couched as a pub conversation. Its author's dark deeds emphasise the presence of sin, not the operation of grace. The religion of its characters is football, not Roman Catholicism.

Nevertheless, both writers use a dominating metaphor around which all action revolves. For Waugh this was Brideshead itself, the stately home whose values are being polluted by modernity. For McBride it is the equally monolithic Gordon Brown, a titanic statesman of genius and moral certainty who saved the world but has been traduced by an ungrateful nation. Power Trip is not an act of contrition but an attempt at rehabilitation. If only we had known the "real" Gordon Brown; if only we had understood how deeply he cared; if only we could have seen him in private; if only we could have appreciated what was going on inside his head; if only, if only, urges McBride, then the Brown administration would not have been such a bloody cock-up. And that, I'm afraid, is where Power Trip goes all wrong.

His theory lends his writing a tone of indignation, where Waugh opted for elegy. Yes, I was nasty, says McBride, but I was doing it to further this really good and nice man, who knew nothing about my activities, and you ought to have appreciated him more. This drags. So much so that we begin to notice amid the contrition the odd score being settled and inconvenient fact being slid over.