I don't think it would have made any difference at the time knowing how much Gordon Brown really wanted to end poverty in India or was really worried about the economic threat of China. Well, not to anyone who knew how Brown was really governing the country. So what if his heart was in the right place? Everything else was all over the shop.

If Brown was such a wonderful man who inspired all around him with intense loyalty, why exactly was it necessary for people such as McBride to devote so much effort to smearing his colleagues? And why did everything fall to pieces in about six months? McBride says he loved Brown. Nobody is indifferent to their boss. Most people fluctuate between love and loathing. Organisations only go bad when everyone feels the same way about the boss all the time. Power Trip depicts a leader-worshipping cult which suddenly degenerates into a mass suicide pact.

McBride has written the wrong book.  Buried within Power Trip are interesting thoughts about civil service recruitment and promotion (no, seriously), and there is real value in the chapters discussing the Budget and the role of a spin doctor. Our author is undoubtedly talented. Nobody can go from an unfashionable backwater like Customs and Excise to head of communications at the Treasury as quickly as he did without ability.  It's such a pity that this was frittered away peddling dirt. It is also a shame that he wastes his and our time now thrashing out who did and did not say nasty things about Douglas.

Interior repentance entails a radical reorientation of life, not just an end of sin but a turning away from evil. We need a book telling us how to run a modern government which prevents, and does not require, people acting like Damian McBride. Who better to write that than Damian McBride?

So while we wait for him to write the serious book he should have produced, might I recommend the box set of Brideshead Revisited?