You have been warned, Mr Blair

Rachel Johnson talks to Vernon Coleman, the one-man publishing sensation who has now turned his sights on the ‘lying little warmonger’ in Downing Street

If you’re a Telegraph reader — as I do hope you are — you too will have seen those ads placed by a Dr Vernon Coleman, MB. Not the ones that ask ‘Does Your Memory Fail You?’ above the ink drawing of the man in a suit and specs, but the ones that ask, even more worryingly, ‘Looking for a Present?’ Turns out, Dr Coleman has got the perfect present for just about everybody. For a golf lover, we have The Man Who Inherited a Golf Course, described as a ‘superb novel’ and ‘terrific present for anyone who enjoys golf,’ with 29,000 copies sold. For a cat lover, there is Alice’s Diary, a tome (over 51,000 sold) that describes a year in the life of a mixed tabby cat with ‘great humour and insight’. Then there is The Village Cricket Tour, a ‘marvellous present for all cricket lovers’ which will give ‘hours of pleasure’ and has apparently been compared — it does not specify by whom — with Three Men in a Boat. Over 34,000 copies sold. Last but not least, we have The Bilbury Chronicles, designed to appeal to lovers of rural life. ‘Over half a million readers have already discovered the joys of Vernon Coleman’s novels set in and around the fictional Devon village of Bilbury,’ the ad gushes. Only £12.95 in hardback!

You may snicker. You may titter over the man’s free use of unaudited sales figures and unattributed quotes. But do the math. The author, who stopped practising 20 years ago and resigned from the NHS over a matter of principle (he refused to put diagnoses on sick notes on the grounds that it breached patient confidentiality), must be making the sort of money that most professional writers can only dream of, and he doesn’t have an agent, a publisher, a distributor, or a heap of remaindered copies reminding him he never earned out his advance either, because he does all those jobs himself.