The Rivals: the intimate story of a political marriage Jim Naughtie Fourth Estate, £16.99 ISBN 1841154733

A couple of weeks ago, I heard someone say that we should feel sorry for Jim Naughtie. His book The Rivals: the intimate story of a political marriage (Fourth Estate) has been the great turkey of the publishing year, a Heaven's Gate for the commentariat. Fourth Estate thought it was on to a guaranteed winner: the inside story, based on "unique access" to the main participants, of "the most enduring, complex and important relationship in recent times", written by, as one rival author put it to me, "the ultimate establishment hack". Royally hyped for the past couple of years, it is already, within three months of publication, a flop of gargantuan proportions.

We should feel sorry for Naughtie, the chap said, because he had the misfortune to be published immediately after 11 September. "Poor chap," I was told. "It never stood a chance."

Hmm. Poor chap, indeed. I could do with such misfortune. His advance, depending on which source you believe, was between £300,000 and £350,000. So no one bought it: big deal, as Naughtie's bank manager no doubt put it. He should care. But I bet he does care. I have never been offered even a tenth of Naughtie's advance (yet I like to think . . .). But even if you write a book just for the money, you still want it to be read. Especially if, as the main presenter on Radio 4's Today programme, you hold one of the most important positions in the chattering-class firmament, and before that you were one of the most respected political writers of your time.

So what went wrong? It is impossible to get details of the number of copies sold. Not surprisingly, Fourth Estate refused to confirm any figures. But let's put it this way: when Jim Naughtie's word processor gave a party, no one came. Though every bookshop seems to have copies staring out from everywhere, I know no one who has bought a copy or knows of anyone who has. And if the sad political obsessives I hang out with don't have Naughtie's book, it's difficult to think of anyone who would, because it received almost no coverage beyond a smattering of the obligatory reviews.

It is not that there's no market for political books - take the success of Andrew Rawnsley's Servants of the People (which sold well into six figures and reached the top ten of non-fiction bestsellers in both hardback and paperback) and, on a smaller scale, Jo-Anne Nadler's biography of William Hague. Nadler's book, with hardly the most propitious of subjects, had a sensible print run (unlike The Rivals) of 5,000, almost all of which were sold. Everyone was happy.

Forget 11 September. The real reason why The Rivals has been and gone without leaving any kind of shadow is because - there's no way round this - the book is plain dull. And it's dull because there is nothing of any interest in it that isn't in Servants of the People. (Well, there's one thing: a rather good Alastair Campbell story, which has his son telling him: "You want a good soundbite? Here's one - you're a crap dad.") There are too many factual errors, such as repeating the notion that Campbell keeps a diary ("my pension", as he supposedly calls it). After Peter Oborne made the same claim in his biography, Campbell went ballistic and flatly denied keeping any sort of diary. Unless he is a barefaced liar, the story is wrong.

The quality of Naughtie's contacts is peerless. He counts the Prime Minister among his friends, and has an annual dinner with Blair on the eve of the Labour Party conference. Good contacts is one thing; genuine friendship can bring problems. As one senior political commentator put it to me: "Rawnsley is good at getting inside the establishment, but Naughtie is the establishment. And their books give that away. Rawnsley betrays everything his sources tell him, and they keep coming back for more. Naughtie doesn't want to upset his friends, and my God it shows. I literally fell asleep reading it."

When I asked a (thoroughly unscientific but thoroughly representative) sample of Press Gallery members what they thought of the book, none of them could offer a word of praise. As one put it: "I honestly can't remember a word of it."

So Naughtie received £300,000 for a glorified cuttings job. Good luck to him. But there's a story here that goes beyond the merits or otherwise of his book. Rawnsley's book is far from perfect - with its details of conversations, as if taken from transcripts, which can't possibly be wholly accurate, and the breathless style of a bonkbuster novel. But by providing chapter and verse on every major government decision and intrigue, Rawnsley not only ensured that The Rivals will end up as stove feed, but he can genuinely claim to have turned the course of history. Just as the monarchy was never the same after Andrew Morton, so politics has not been the same since Andrew Rawnsley. It's easy to forget what we knew about new Labour before Rawnsley. We knew there were feuds and chaos, and we knew isolated stories. But Rawnsley gave us the big picture, and filled in the gaps. The problem is what's left.

Time moves on, and we need the inside story of the latest events. But we now know so much about the personality battles across the government, and especially the "TeeBeeGeeBees", as the Blair-Brown feud is now known, that the latest daily instalments barely cause a ripple. On the BBC's Breakfast with Frost recently, Gordon Brown refused to deny his fabled agreement with Blair that the Prime Minister would stand down and let the Chancellor have his turn as PM. What a story! But it barely made page two of the following day's papers. Thanks to Rawnsley, it's all a big yawn now. Been there. Done that.

Stephen Pollard is a writer and political commentator

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