There’s more to the Harris trick. The Ghost takes the business of research and makes the plot hinge on several bits of information as they become available. The Blair/Lang world turns out to be as layered as an onion, so the ghost-writer is peeling away stuff which matters to the story. All marvellous. It came as something of a disappointment that Mr Harris actually holds rather pedestrian views on Blair (at least as revealed in newspaper interviews).

The ghost-writer is himself a fascinating character. I see a sort of Piers Morgan: university-educated, but determined not to rise above the low-brow.

I think what made the book so intensely pleasurable to me is that I have spent many, many hours with powerful people – mostly men – and many of them have been dubious, peculiar and perhaps even wicked. I have written speeches for all sorts, and have sometimes counselled people I suspect of wrong-doing. This is always interesting work, and it is almost always exciting to speculate on how strong people accumulatre influence. The point is that it is always mysterious because it is always about the business of accumulating trust. And there is always the great oddity of really getting to grips with the longing of certain people to make a really big mark in the world. Mr Harris’s ghostwriter wrestles with his thoughts about Lang much as I often have done as I deal with corporate leaders and plenty of others.

For some years I made repeated if half-hearted attempts to become an advisor to Tony Blair. I dared to imagine that I could help him wrestle with the problem of reconciling his urges to be a warrior and a Christian. Anyway, he – or his people – didn’t bite. When I read The Ghost, I found myself missing the essential dilemma in describing (or satirising) Blair. Harris does describe how one never knows whether Blair actually had any conviction or was merely an actor. But Harris avoids altogether the greater piquancy, which is whether Blair had a rather barmy religious conviction about his higher purposes. What’s interesting about Blair is not only whether he had convictions but on what he based whatever convictions he had. Anyway Blair is much more interesting than Lang is.  

Holroyd describes how Irving rose at 5am to swim in the Thames before work. The day done, he attended a “school of arms” in Chancery Lane. Reminiscent of something very similar portrayed in Bleak House, it taught him how to swashbuckle. (By the way, he might have attended to the kind of dancing class also found in Hard Times.) And then to elocution class (attended then and for decades since by most British people keen to get ahead). £100 allowed him to invest in the costumes and kit which equipped him for life on the stage.

The point is that he was just a clerk, but - like millions of his countrymen – he had the imagination and the means to better himself. In my talks with corporates, I call this self-entrepreneurship. It’s not a pretty neologism, but the idea is that one invests in oneself both as a person and a sort of mini-business. Samuel Smiles would have understood.   

“The 1950s were a good time to be a writer in Britain. Change and the redistibribution of priotiries and wealth were everywhere in political, economic and cultural spheres, yet the vantage point that individual thought and creativity stands on was peculiarly solid. Living was cheap and improving materially faster than its cost… [Social gaps were still large] but in the 1950s social permanences that had been bricked in until the war turned out not so resistant after all, and the many-accented voices of the suburbs and provinces, the not-public-schooled, not-county-housed, were no longer bricked out.” (Reference: Semi-invisible Man: The life of Norman Lewis, by Julian Evans. Page 363)

The lastest examples I have of the great and the good succumbing to the ridiculous affectation of enjoying this barbaric festival of testosterone come from last Saturday’s Financial Times. In it we learn that is the game of choice of (Jacques) Herzog and (Pierre) de Meuron, the designers of the Bejing Bird’s Nest. They designed the ground used by FC Basel, their home team. Now they are designing a ground for Portsmouth FC (a club which has the merit at least of being proud of its family following).

Lest I be taken to mean that there is no merit in football, I supposes I ought to concede its usefulness to the international investigators trying to understand the wrong-doings in Darfur, as retailed in the FT (26/27 July 2008). They resorted to talking football because they found it difficult to discuss the matter in hand. Who can blame them?