A history of spinners, from Robert Walpole to Damian McBride and Andy Coulson

A full colour Andy Coulson looms ominously behind a black and white David Cameron on the front cover of Andrew Blick and George Jones’s book on aides to the Prime Minister. In a week when another former prime ministerial adviser, Damian McBride, has been spilling the beans on life behind the scenes of Gordon Brown’s government, the story of the apparatchiks who work in the shadows of the people in power seems ripe for revelation.

However, if this makes you think that the text is going to be filled with juicy disclosures about today’s politics then, after a compelling first chapter detailing the workings of Cameron’s Downing Street, you will be sorely disappointed. Although Blick and Jones share a publisher with McBride, the revelations here are rather more limited. Coulson’s last appearance comes on page 11, and the section on the PM’s political machine is done and dusted by the end of the introduction.