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For students of political archaeology, there is at least one notable event chronicled by Tony Blair in this long awaited (by his publisher) account of His Journey. It is the moment when he decided to become an MP and the course of our nation’s history changed. He can’t recall the date but his father-in-law, actor Tony Booth, arranged for him and Cherie to meet an MP friend, Tom Pendry, at the House of Commons.

“I went up the steps and on my left passed Westminster Hall where Charles I had been tried. I walked into the cavernous central lobby where the public went to meet their MPs and I stopped. I was thunderstruck. It just hit me. This was where I wanted to be. It was very odd. Odd because so unlike me and odd because in later times I was never known as a ‘House of Commons man’. But there and then I had a complete presentiment: here I was going to be. This was my destiny. This was my political home.”