This autobiography has been reviewed by professional and amateur reviewers alike as open, honest, refreshing, different and so on. Reviewers of all persuasions who read political autobiographies have lauded John Major's.

I'm puzzled.

I don't read books like these from cover to cover, but dip into them to check out the various episodes that pique my interest. For example, I was keen to see what Major thought of Margaret Thatcher and William Hague; I wondered how he saw the Sterling crisis that he presided over; and I wondered how he got to where he was. I then read the rest in a similar manner.

My conclusion is that he admired Thatcher and was loyal to her but that she still managed to attack him and his politics once she'd left office. Hague gets miniscule mentions but Major clearly liked him: subsequent events might lead Major to add a paragraph disowning Hague as he catastrophically led the Tory Party for four years immediately post Major; and has led the Party to the brink of bankruptcy.

I don't recommend this book to anyone, though, for the following reasons.

There is virtually nothing in this book that I either didn't already know or couldn't have got from a newspaper or the internet. I wanted Major to give me real insights into Thatcher, I wanted real insights into the Sterling crisis and I wanted real insights into the rest of his Administration. We got none of any of this.

Maybe Major is just too nice, or just isn't a political animal, and can't bring himself to tell the truth and to give his real version of events in the raw. Everything has been held back. Consequently, what Major has done is to have written an apologia and a defence. He makes a variety of references to events and others' writings and comments on them and defends himself as appropriate. He could have simply given his version of events and let the reader make the contrasts and draw the conclusions.

As far as the Sterling crisis is concerned, he plodded through this sorry episode and told us about things that Panorama, I think it was, spelled out much better in a one hour programme on the subject. He gave us just one or two snippets of how he tried to get the German government to help him out when clearly they were a key factor in this whole episode. He remained virtually silent on how he interacted with his own major Ministerial players: Lamont, Clarke and Heseltine; he gave us no insights whatsoever into how his senior Civil Service advisors were advising him; and he gave us no insights into how the Bank of England were working with him.

One thing that helped to mark this book out as a weak attempt at an autobiography was the way that he prefaced a relatively large number of events by letting us in on the fact that he did them early in the morning, or following an early start. Major feels the need to tell us over and over that the life of a PM starts early in the morning. Hardly the stuff of which the Premiership of the UK is concerned, is it?

As for his rise to power from humble beginnings, fine. No great shakes, but I suppose he did do well to get where he did. Then again, someone like Major would have to be the natural choice to follow someone like Thatcher. Another bright star like her was clearly not the preferred choice of the Tory Party at that time ... nor since!

I suppose this will be Major's only publication; and that's what he deserves. This is not a

4 January 2002