Lordy: I'm not sure who will want to read this book. It's not a bad book by any stretch, although Boulton is not always the liveliest of writers and the going is sometimes laborious. It's more that the Blair years are receding in the memory and I'm not sure who might wish to be reminded of them, outside the parliamentary Labour party. And the Blair decade has been picked over with much entertaining spite and venom recently by some of the key players - Cherie Blair, Alastair Campbell, the hilarious Lord Levy.

I suppose you might argue that history demands a meticulous account from a purely neutral standpoint - but then Adam Boulton is perhaps not quite the man to do that, either. It must be hard to remain entirely neutral while your missus is on the phone in the next room, cooking up some outrage with Alastair Campbell. Mr Boulton is married to one of Tony Blair's former first lieutenants, Anji Hunter, and the guest list at their wedding formed a veritable Who's Who of new Labour (although Boulton, painfully, lets us know that Michael Howard and Menzies Campbell were there too). There's nothing illegal about marrying new Labour apparatchiks, of course, and Boulton's proximity to those running “the project” did not remotely affect his judgment as political editor of Sky News, where he always struck me as being scrupulously fair and impartial (and, uh, extremely well informed). But he is rather more partial here and the book is, on balance, a little more generous to Mr Blair than many of the rest of us might be - as you might probably guess from the rather mimsy title.

He is at his best on Blair's relationship with the media, one characterised either by downright intimidation or by flattery and favouritism. Most print journalists, Boulton suggests, did not maintain a professional distance, “either rolling over to be tickled or cowering at the power of new Labour. It was certainly not comfortable for those who were judged to be against the project”. On the important coterie around Blair, he is unforgivably generous to Peter Mandelson, whom I have always assumed is responsible for every ill that has ever stricken the earth, floods, pestilence, plague et al. Mandelson was certainly not, Boulton argues, dishonest or untrustworthy, simply on occasion too partisan in support of new Labour. Hmm.

However, Boulton sticks the boot in good and proper to Alastair Campbell. “Campbell was an obsessive personality who had a habit of forming addictions and dependencies on individuals,” Boulton states, adding that to these people - Robert Maxwell, Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair - the spin doctor was “slavishly” and by implication unthinkingly loyal. He was also devious and untruthful and, after 2001, became for Tony Blair “at best a liability and at worst a seriously destructive force”.

Boulton rightly notes that Campbell had never been much good as a journalist, but his “petulant partisanship” endeared him to new Labour, where “truth itself took a back seat to the cause”. Ruthless, inflated with intimations of his own greatness and power, Campbell treated the prime minister as an equal, dealt with journalists summarily and cheerfully lied to them. “You know why I had to do that, Adam,” Campbell whines after having told the poli-tical editor a downright porky pie. Bernard Ingham never lied, Boulton comments balefully. Boulton even takes away from Campbell his claim to have been one of the architects of new Labour, insisting that those in at the beginning were Mandelson, Blair adviser Roger Liddle and a certain Anji Hunter. I suppose we can forgive the writer for that most likeable of sins, uxoriousness, but it seems unnecessarily harsh on Campbell.

Blair, meanwhile, is commended for his achievements in Northern Ireland, his breadth (if not depth) of vision, his ability to communicate a message, certain domestic policy initiatives, helping Africa and the third world in general. But the prime minister who emerges here, as a character, is no less elliptical and mysterious than before. Boulton writes of his strange placidity and even subservience as the likes of Campbell and Hunter were downright rude to him - often in front of outsiders who left in a state of considerable shock. The writer finds the prime minister essentially “culturally shallow”, as evidenced by the vapidity of his ideas for the ludicrous Millennium Dome and his readiness to band together disparate hostile forces (the pro-foxhunting lobby and the trade unions, for example) as “forces of conservatism”. It is clear that for Blair, “conservatism” meant nothing whatsoever other than to be opposed to him.

Boulton is rightly severe on the invasion of Iraq and the part played by 10 Downing Street in the circumstances that led to the death of the government scientist Dr David Kelly. Like most journalists, he is highly critical of Lord Hutton's report into this appalling incident (although I seem to remember he was rather less so at the time). On the supposed deal between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair at the Granita restaurant, the deal that rankled for so many years, Boulton argues that it simply did not take place. Blair always knew that Brown would not make a decent prime minister, that he was the senior partner in the relationship. Brown simply inferred that some sort of deal had been struck.

So, if you're hankering for the recent - already discredited and soon to be rehabilitated - past, this may be the book for you. But there is not much in it that we have not been told before, much though one might admire the thoroughness with which Boulton has gone about his task.

Tony's Ten Years: Memories of the Blair Administration by Adam Boulton

Simon & Schuster £17.99 pp384

Available at the Sunday Times BooksFirst price of £16.19 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585 or here

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