You don't get to be an editor (admittedly of the News of the World) at the age of 28 without having talent in some form or another, and this particular prodigy, who went on to edit the Mirror for nine years, at least knows how to retain his reader's interest.

On the other hand, he has absolutely no use for thought or reflection. On the evidence presented here he hardly ever seems to have read a book and appears a total stranger to self-doubt. That disqualifies him from being a natural diarist in the way, for example, that Alan Clark was (though those Diaries he claims to have read not once but twice).

This book certainly cannot compete with them but it may be unfair to judge it by such high standards. For one thing, as the author freely concedes, the "private diaries" as reproduced here are essentially an artificial construct. What he, slightly unoriginally, calls "the daily grind of editing" prevented him from sitting down nightly, or even weekly, and looking back on what had happened. Instead (a prudent precaution as things turned out) he preserved all sorts of memorabilia from his life at the top of Canary Wharf: contemporary jottings, memos, letters, faxes, e-mails, even front pages of the Daily Mirror - all the detritus of a journalist's life.