There’s more to the Harris trick. The Ghost takes the business of research and makes the plot hinge on several bits of information as they become available. The Blair/Lang world turns out to be as layered as an onion, so the ghost-writer is peeling away stuff which matters to the story. All marvellous. It came as something of a disappointment that Mr Harris actually holds rather pedestrian views on Blair (at least as revealed in newspaper interviews).

The ghost-writer is himself a fascinating character. I see a sort of Piers Morgan: university-educated, but determined not to rise above the low-brow.

I think what made the book so intensely pleasurable to me is that I have spent many, many hours with powerful people – mostly men – and many of them have been dubious, peculiar and perhaps even wicked. I have written speeches for all sorts, and have sometimes counselled people I suspect of wrong-doing. This is always interesting work, and it is almost always exciting to speculate on how strong people accumulatre influence. The point is that it is always mysterious because it is always about the business of accumulating trust. And there is always the great oddity of really getting to grips with the longing of certain people to make a really big mark in the world. Mr Harris’s ghostwriter wrestles with his thoughts about Lang much as I often have done as I deal with corporate leaders and plenty of others.

For some years I made repeated if half-hearted attempts to become an advisor to Tony Blair. I dared to imagine that I could help him wrestle with the problem of reconciling his urges to be a warrior and a Christian. Anyway, he – or his people – didn’t bite. When I read The Ghost, I found myself missing the essential dilemma in describing (or satirising) Blair. Harris does describe how one never knows whether Blair actually had any conviction or was merely an actor. But Harris avoids altogether the greater piquancy, which is whether Blair had a rather barmy religious conviction about his higher purposes. What’s interesting about Blair is not only whether he had convictions but on what he based whatever convictions he had. Anyway Blair is much more interesting than Lang is.  

Typically, I had thought of the great man even as I looked down from 35,000 feet at a trans-Mediterranean ferry cleaving the sparkling briney. I would have been on it if my conscience had been in better nick.

The funny thing is, reading JP makes me feel less guilty than just dreaming him up. This latest piece berated politicians for not promoting a post-growth economic and social creed. Mr Porritt seems to believe that this absence of leadership is blameworthy. He may think (but doesn’t really say) that the public can’t be blamed for not getting the message, because their political masters haven’t pushed it.

I’d have thought that there is very limited scope for democratic politicians to get ahead of their voters. Voters have been on the receiving end of twenty years of green campaigning, and it has become the leading orthodoxy, so if the masses choose to ignore the green message I’m inclined to think that it may because they’re living life the way they prefer.

I got almost cross with the Porritt message at the end of his column. He seems to feel that if voters won’t lead or be led toward “sustainability” then it’s just as well a recession will show them the way.  

This argument suggests that recession will give people a taste of green living – and pehaps a taste for it. We’ll see. I can imagine that people may learn that a camping holiday in Britain is even nicer than a Tuscan villa. But it won’t stop people hoping that the recession passes and they can be more confident that their mortgage is safe. 

I think that Jonathon Porritt believes that there is a large spiritual as well as an ecological deficit in modern life. He thinks people ought to embrace a radical alternative. Maybe they should. But I haven’t, and I know very few people who have. I mean that I know monks, greens, environmentalists - exactly the people who understand Jonathon Porritt’s message and even share it. But in every serious respect almost all of them go on living lives which are well short of radical transformation in a green direction.  

For the life of me, I can’t imagine what would radicalise people. An apocalypse might force such a change, or fear of one. But I don’t think an abstract concern for humanity or the planet will. And I find I can’t despise my fellow-humans for not being as altruistic as Mr Porritt thinks they should be.

Nor is it quite an absence of altruism. It’s more a sense that they don’t want to give up their definite delights for hypothetical improvements accruing to others.   

Nixonland is a vivid piece of work. It’s almost a film script. It sets scenes in the most deft way.

Perlstein describes the emergence of the hippie-straight split, as I said. Eggheads and hard hats were ranged against one another. Nixon managed to ride the massive, unpredicted surge of reaction, patriotism, religiosity, plain clean-ness with which so many Americans met the new world. Nixon experienced a new politics in which he could herd “hard-hat” natural Democrats into the Republican fold. Much of the anti-Vietnam war sentiment which McGovern expressed produced the effect that Nixon gained votes as the man who would most likely stop the war. Nixon could never actually have a victory, because he only really felt the defeat which nestled within it. In 1972, he had an enemy Congress. (“So that’s how they’ll piss on this thing”, he said, or words to that effect.)

This business of making the lower orders vote for capitalism has usually had an element of patriotism to it. That’s the ancient conservative game when it comes to making poor people vote against their own interests. or to be more subtle about it: conservatives have to persuade poor people that preserving the rich is the only way to banish poverty. The flag shoos in the waverers. Nixon succeeded by dissing the peace movement and offering peace.

The right often wins by seeming economically capable, even if it means the rich can’t be squeezed until the pips squeak. But they need populism to pull the rick off. Reagan did it by being a down home boy who offered economic vitality to all. Margaret Thatcher did it by being the anti-establishment provincial promising that she could snatch power for the people from the unions. David Cameron seems determined to go back to Peel’s old formula: a Tory delivering enough Whig policy to be very attractive.

So as we look at McCain vs Obama, do we think Perlstein’s thesis is at work? In all the endless discussion of Obama vs Clinton, Obama was more liberal-elite than Clinton, and had plenty of black appeal too. Wow. No-one could have predicted the first bit of that equation. That left Clinton, the entitlement, establishment candidate trying to look hard hat. It wasn’t easy. And then there was the internet, bringing cash and support from quarters no-one had ever tapped.

In all, it seems as though Perlsetin may be describing a politics which is largely dead. America’s choice is – as usual – tricky. The Republicans are offering experience, volatilty, courage and a big dollop of liberalism (that is, leftish policy). Oh, and a candidate the most active Republicans don’t like. The Democrats are offering blackness, youth, vigour, vagueness, the internet, inexperience and a big dollop of liberalism.

If that picture’s right, then Perlstein story of paranaoia, fear and one great cultural divide has shattered into a far more complicated and nuanced picture. But also a much more relaxed one.

My generation – the 60s baby boomers – heard very little good about the right in America. It was all part of the lazy superiority we felt about the non-liberal world. We vaguely felt there were those nice Kennedy’s and then the awful rest. Those other Americans who weren’t signed up to the creed were inclined to wear pointy hats and white sheets. Those Yanks! George Wallace was a particularly despised politician. But Barry Goldwater was up there too as a public enemy. 

This new book is edited by Goldwater’s son Barry, and John Dean (the Nixon associate and commentator). What comes zooming out of these pages is a portrait of the kind of politician we are in severe need of. Goldwater and his handsome wife zipped around the world fueled by James Bond quotients of Martini. The senator had been a lively pilot in an age when people expected to have larks. (These were the real, liberated late 1940s and 1950s – not the stuffy age as portrayed by 1960s radicals.) In one hilarious episode, Goldwater explains how he fetched up in a Mexican jail, having quite literally lost his shirt to a fellow convict, and bounced a cheque on his gaoler when he bribed his way out of chokey.

So we find someone who is relaxed in his own skin. He is also in love with the wilderness world of Arizona, his home state. In this, Goldwater’s enthusiasm strongly echoes the writing and sentiment of Ed Abbey or Doug Peacock, people of a later – hippy – generation, my own. What’s more, he shared these enthusiams with his wife. And that reminds us of the passion of John McCain’s western wife for horse-trekking in western wilderness. Goldwater’s wife and McCain’s wife may look like perfect, uptight blue-rinses. But that’s only because we don’t bother to inquire of them properly.