Inside Number 10

Truth sometimes has to work hard to be more convincing than fiction. We all feel we already know what life is like inside Tony Blair's 10 Downing Street, because we have seen it on the Rory Bremner show.

The nervous, eager-to-please Prime Minister and his master, the cynical and bullying Alastair Campbell: it is as convincing a duo as Holmes and Watson or Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Hitherto, the only people who could tell us what really went on behind the scenes had all signed the Official Secrets Act.

But in March this year Peter Stothard, a former editor of The Times, was given unprecedented permission to be a "fly on the wall" in Downing Street, shadowing the Prime Minister for 30 days. His account of that period - which just happened to include the Iraq War, plus the last days of frenzied diplomacy that preceded it - is no less convincing than the Bremner version and, in places, almost as entertaining.

Where Campbell is concerned, fiction and truth seem not too far apart. He is omnipresent here: the entry for him in the index is twice as long as those for Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary and Chancellor combined. At one point Stothard refers, with delicious ambiguity, to "John Prescott and Alastair Campbell, both known as 'the Deputy Prime Minister', the one because he is, the other because he seems to be". And the caustic Campbell sense of humour is a constant presence: when Blair asks how he should begin his TV address to the nation, announcing the outbreak of war, Campbell suggests, "My fellow Americans!".

But, of course, the Prime Minister himself is not the fretting, gormless Blair of the Bremner sketches, even though there are some fretful moments in these pages. He comes across as someone relentlessly driven to get on with the task in hand, convinced of that task's fundamental rightness. Doubts or arguments about the whole basis of the policy are never entertained; the Cabinet is there not for debate, but merely for moral support, and the allocation of tasks. Everything else is just tactics and PR - which is why Campbell is so essential.

Readers looking for shattering revelations will be disappointed. No dossiers were sexed up, or down, while Stothard was around. The most dramatic moment in the book is when, only hours before the key vote in Parliament on the eve of the war, Campbell takes a phone call from the White House, telling him that the invasion is about to start. "Well," he murmurs, "if you could just hold it until we've got this out of the way, it would be very helpful." You know something must be seriously wrong when Campbell starts talking like an old-fashioned British civil servant.

This is an observant, thought-provoking book, written with an admirable lightness of touch. Stothard is a self-effacing author, keeping both his presence and his opinions to a minimum: only once does he bring himself directly into the narrative, when he asks Blair directly how he feels about Iraqi children killed by British bombs. Otherwise the style is pure documentary, the classic "I am a camera" routine.

But that itself is, of course, a fiction - the fiction on which this particular version of the truth is based. When the conversations get confidential, doors close and Stothard is left in the corridor. And what really goes on then? One day the autobiographies of Blair and Campbell may help us to frame a fuller answer to that question, by supplying a little more truth and a little more fiction, too.