Guido hasn’t read Hain’s “Outside In“ memoir yet, though his interview in the Observer suggests that it should, to a extent generous even by the standards of political memoirs, be filed under fiction. On having to resign after being exposed for over-spending an undeclared £100,000 under-the-counter on his Labour Party deputy leadership campaign he pleads

“It was about an honest mistake and a disorganised end to the campaign and when I found out about it I told everyone. It’s quite possible that nobody would ever have found out if I hadn’t done that. And a lot of thanks I got for it.”

Not true, Hain only went to the police about it after details were published on this blog and on the front page of the Guardian. Decca Aitkenhead says in the interview that for Hain “the subject is still terribly raw”. No doubt it is, that is still no excuse for falsifying the facts.