Cherie suddenly brought forward the publication of her book to coincide with mine. To top it off, she claimed I didn't "know anything" about her husband and Gordon

Everything had been going so well. D-Day, or whatever they call the end of the agonising wait for publication in the book world, was approaching and there had been only the odd, minor hitch. But then, with the Mail on Sunday's final round of serialisation in hand and interviews with Andrew Marr and Adam Boulton set for a few hours later, the wife of an old friend showed up on our doorstep and shrieked: "Stop!"

Not exactly. But Cherie Blair did suddenly bring forward the scheduled autumn publication of her reflections on the law and love, motherhood and menstruation, conception and contraception, to coincide with my book. To top it off, she answered my widely reported revelation that Tony felt Gordon Brown could never defeat David Cameron in an election by insisting I didn't "know anything" about such matters.

Of course, she must have known that I did know. As soon as the first serialisation of my book appeared, one of Tony's oldest, closest allies sent word through a friend that the Blairites were unhappy at the frankness of my revelations. It was hardly the most auspicious start of "publication week". Still, despite everything that we'd all gone through since I first met a fresh-faced TB at a diplomat's dinner 14 years earlier, I still looked on the Blairs as friends.

Honesty is the best policy

The first round of TV interviews steered clear of many of the book's revelations about personal life alongside the Blairs and the Blairites, and even my fundraising experiences with the likes of Matthew Harding and Bernie Ecclestone. There was not a word about Carole Caplin's massaging TB at Chequers. It was mostly "cash for peerages" or - as it proved a lot easier to explain in a book than in a few soundbites - how cash was not swapped for peerages, but how the marriage of money and politics in Britain has become so poisonous that only state funding and limits on donations hold out any hope for sorting out the mess.

Inevitably, the subject of Cherie came up. She had said I didn't know what Tony felt about his old chum Gordon. So did I? I tried to be as gentle as I could, but I'd long since decided there was no point in telling my story if I wasn't going to be frank and open. I pointed out that Cherie had rarely been present during the hundreds of hours I had worked and talked with her husband and that, yes, Tony did say Gordon couldn't beat Cameron. I delicately stopped short of adding, as I do in the book, that when Gordon contrived to screw up the "election that wasn't" at the height of his honeymoon period, Tony also told me his successor was discovering it was a lot easier to spend a decade in guerrilla warfare against No 10 than to run a country.

Living and learning

The newspaper interviews came next, and the most enjoyable and, I think, insightful was with the Guardian's Jackie Ashley. She got it across that alongside the kiss-and-tell revelations - not literally, because while Cherie's book does sex, mine is more rock'n'roll - I set out to take a serious, deeply personal look at the new Labour project that has dominated British politics for the past decade. The result is, I hope, not bitter. After all, I had risen improbably from the one-room east London flat I shared with my parents to an extraordinary relationship with the man who steered Labour to power. It is honest, and sometimes critical of Tony and of Gordon, of others at the centre of power, and of myself. It is less kiss-and-tell than live-and-learn.

No one's courtier

The final media appearance of an exhausting week was both the oddest and the most gratifying. Having been filmed reviewing political events for Andrew Neil's This Week politics programme on the tennis court, I then joined Andrew and the couchmates Michael Portillo and Diane Abbott for a discussion of Labour's current crisis. Diane at one point hit out at Blair's "courtiers" for piling misery on beleaguered Gordon Brown, prompting Andrew to ask whether she had "Lord Levy in mind". Diane graciously replied: "No. Michael is a good Hackney boy, and no one's courtier."

"A Question of Honour" by Lord Levy is published by Simon & Schuster (£18.99)

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