Politics: This autumn sees the release of a new film, Love Actually, in which Hugh Grant plays a British prime minister who falls in love with his tea lady. In real life, Tony Blair's tea lady is Vera, an Irish messenger working in 10 Downing Street. She keeps the prime minister regularly supplied with PG Tips and jammy dodgers, makes sure his overnight bag is packed for overseas visits, and generally sustains "my boy Tone" in good spirits.
"If you want to know who really keeps this place going," says the PM, "here she is".
Vera is just one of a colourful cast in Peter Stothard's brilliant account of life in Number 10 during the Iraq war. Jack Straw, foreign secretary, provides the light relief. If the PM forgets his glasses before a summit meeting, it is Straw who is sent scampering back to fetch them. When we come across Straw polishing a pair of shoes in Downing Street, it is a surprise to discover that they are his own rather than Blair's. The two Johns - Reid and Prescott - serve up menace by snarling and sneering at appeasers among the ranks of Labour MPs. Alastair Campbell plays the court favourite. He is ever-present, usually track-suited, at the prime minister's side, and speaks to him with a sharp familiarity that is tolerated from no-one else.
"How should I start?" asks Blair about a TV broadcast. "My fellow Americans . . ?" suggests Campbell.
And while the business of war goes on around him, little Leo Blair toddles through the corridors of power with his plastic cart, leaving Wagon Wheels on his father's desk.
It is the vivid character sketches matched by dramatic storytelling that make this book such a page-turner. 30 Days is undoubtedly one of the books of the year. It is set to become the defining contemporary text of the Blair government. Peter Stothard, a former editor of the Times, shows himself as the British Bob Woodward in his mastery of "I was there" journalism. Yet there is also something in his waspish, gossipy style that is reminiscent of the finest British political diarists, Chips Channon in the 1930s and Alan Clark in the 1980s.
At the centre of Stothard's story is the character of the prime minister. Blair's critics often portray him as vacillating and eager to please; the reality could hardly be more different. Blair emerges from these pages as tough and unflinching in the face of public, media and political hostility. It is not weapons of mass destruction that matter, he argues, but "dictators of mass destruction". Even when his job is on the line, Blair moderates his position not one jot. Nothing is "sexed up". There are no apologies or regrets. Slow-handclapping TV audiences, splenetic left-wing MPs, and pompous independent commentators all find themselves whistling in the wind. No wonder the adjective most often used about Tony Blair in the US is "Churchillian". It is this certainty of purpose that to many has been the biggest surprise.
"They are like friends of a man who has long said he is going to leave his wife or take holy orders," writes Stothard. "He has given every sign of doing what he has decided is the right thing. He has put his affairs in order and spoken about his plans to anyone who cared to listen. But few cared to listen, because few believed that he would actually do it."
Just about the only occasion at which Blair appears momentarily flustered is when George Bush arrives at Hillsborough Castle and declares to general astonishment: "Here I am in merry old Ireland." Northern Ireland's politicians are later shown a less genial side to the president when they are "severally and individually lectured" whilst pointedly kept standing. "I hope this is helpful," George Bush tells Bertie Ahern. He is assured it most certainly is.
The first thing Bush had seen on arriving at Hillsborough was a copy of the Belfast Telegraph with the banner headline: 'Day of Reckoning at Peace Summit.'
"Ours?" the president asked. "No, theirs," answered Tony Blair. "Politics is a bit local here."
Any student of American and Irish politics might have reminded the prime minister of Tip O'Neill's observation that all politics is local. Yet the verdict of history is not. Blair believes that he will be judged on his role, in partnership with the US, in asserting a militant liberalism for the post-September 11th world order. A reading of this book, for all the entertainment it provides, suggests that he will stand alongside Churchill and Margaret Thatcher as Britain's most successful and resolute war leader of the modern era.
Richard Aldous teaches British history at University College, Dublin. His Harold Macmillan: A Political Life is published by MacmillanPolitics
30 Days: A Month at the Heart of Blair's War. By Peter Stothard
HarperCollins, 244pp, £8.99