Blair’s slow road from Downing Street to Rome
The best political diaries are often written by people at a slight angle to the centre of power rather than those right at the middle. For instance, Bernard Donoughue’s accounts of his days as a young political adviser in the 1970s were more revealing and vastly more entertaining than the memoirs of his bosses, Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan.

Donoughue was made a Labour peer in 1985 and became a reluctant Minister for Agriculture in Tony Blair’s first government. In the latest instalment of his Westminster Diary – another engaging mix of political intrigue, gossipy lunches and afternoon outings to Ascot or Towcester – we learn that in 1996, a year before Blair was swept into power, knowing that the Labour leader was attending Mass with his family, Donoughue asked the Clerk of Parliament for the official position on whether a Prime Minister could be a Catholic.