Today's Mail has the second instalment of its serialisation of my book.

There's no link to the extracts - 4,000 words - but some of the newslines are summarised here:

DAVID BLUNKETT faced fresh embarrassment last night when unflattering thoughts about fellow ministers became public. Senior members of the Government have spent the past week defending the Home Secretary over his affair.

But, according to a biography of Mr Blunkett, he has pretty harsh words for most of them during unguarded moments in private.

Mr Blunkett apparently criticised Tony Blair, who has gone out of his way to defend his Home Secretary, for not liking people prepared to stand up to him. He thinks that the Prime Minister “tolerated more of Gordon (Brown) than he ought to” and attributes the sacking of Ann Taylor as Chief Whip to her insistence on being frank with Mr Blair.

Mr Blunkett, according to his biographer Stephen Pollard, boasts of being the only minister prepared to stand up to the Chancellor. “Gordon only respects people who stand up to him,” the book quotes Mr Blunkett as saying, according to extracts serialised in the Daily Mail. “I had to take Gordon on quite strongly in the early days of the last Parliament because he was throwing his weight around and he pretty well quietened everyone else.”

Jack Straw, his predecessor as Home Secretary, who has recently been seen supportively on the arm of Mr Blunkett, is accused of having left the department in a “mess”.

“Nothing had prepared us for it. It was worse than any of us had imagined possible. God alone knows what Jack did for four years,” the book said.

Charles Clarke, Secretary of State for Education, is accused of failing to continue the push to raise standards in schools. The book quotes Mr Blunkett as saying “they’ve taken their foot off the accelerator. They have gone soft. They’ve produced documents called Excellence and Enjoyment.” Mr Blunkett is said to regard Robin Cook as a snob, Margaret Beckett as a time server, Tessa Jowell as weak and Patricia Hewitt as lacking strategic grasp.

I cite this in part as an example of how even the most basic summary of a text gets things wrong. As any reading of my Mail extract shows, the quote about Straw is not from Blunkett but from one of his former advisers, the word 'snob' appears nowhere, the comment about Jowell is specific to one event and the reasons for Taylor's sacking were not as the Times reports.

Pip pip.

UPDATE: I owe an apology to The Times. I made the fatal mistake of reading my own words, rather than the news story based on them. All The Times did, it seems, is take the news story which summarised them at face value. Sorry.

And here's a more extensive summary.