CHRIS TITLEY finds the inside story of New Labour a deliciously

honest account of the backbiting behind the spin

IT never used to be like this. Political junkies once had to satiate their desire for Westminster intrigue by reading between the lines of the lobby correspondents' newspaper columns.

These have always been full of "sources close to the Prime Minister", revelations from unnamed senior Cabinet ministers and leaks. They paint an impressionist portrait of the deals and rivalry in government. But they never bring the whole picture into focus.

For that, you had to wait 30 years until confidential Cabinet papers were officially released. They filled in the gaps between the last generation of headlines, long after they could make a difference.

But things changed overnight with the publication of Andrew Rawnsley's Servants Of The People.

Rawnsley, political columnist for The Observer and presenter of Radio Four's The Westminster Hour, is a seasoned Whitehall watcher. But even he must have been surprised by the level of co-operation he got for his book from ministers who were still very much in power.

Everyone talked, from the Prime Minister down. The result is an awesomely well-informed account of New Labour's first years in power.

When the hardback edition came out, its revelations about the ministerial mendacity over Bernie Ecclestone's £1 million donation to the Labour Party captured the headlines for weeks.

The paperback edition has now been released. Its new chapters, covering foot and mouth, the fuel protest and the last General Election, are unlikely to prompt the same outcry. But the book's exposure of the rifts behind this supposedly united Government still cause the reader's jaw to drop.

Chief among these is the clash between the biggest giants in the Westminster jungle: the Prime Minister and his Chancellor. Gordon Brown, still smarting at having the top job "stolen" from him by his protg, has, Rawnsley relates, built his own empire in the Treasury to challenge Tony Blair's powerbase. Blair passed over his best chance to subdue his friend and rival by moving him to the Foreign Office in the wake of the last election landslide. This could yet prove to be Blair's undoing, Rawnsley conjectures.

What makes this such a hugely enjoyable read is the detail. Rawnsley allows us to eavesdrop on what seems like every major ministerial conversation over the past four years.

From the strangely subdued reaction of Tony Blair when he secured his epoch-changing 1997 victory, through Mandelson's roller-coaster ride to Whitehall's relations with President Clinton and the leaders of Europe, Rawnsley takes you there.

Tony Blair's strengths and weaknesses are fully on display. All his tenacity, moral courage and leadership were needed to pull off the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement and the war in Kosovo. Interestingly, the Prime Minister's office later confirmed that Mr Blair himself discussed these events with the author.

The PM's main weaknesses - attaching too much importance to presentation and his terrible vacillations on everything from the euro to foot and mouth - are ruthlessly examined.

The book only has two weaknesses. So many of Rawnsley's notes read 'Private Information' that it hardly seems worth the annotation. And the chapter on the last election is rushed, by comparison to the meticulous standards of the rest of the book. It could have been put together from the cuttings.

But these are small quibbles. This is a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary politics. Uniquely, Servants Of The People has actually changed political history: after reading the first edition, the Prime Minister decided to stop worrying about the daily headlines and concentrate on the bigger picture. In prompting this shift, Andrew Rawnsley has done the nation a big favour.

u Servants Of The People: The Inside Story Of New Labour by Andrew Rawnsley is published by Penguin, price £7.99