A book like this – published 12 weeks after the general election defeat, with the publishers casting Peter Mandelson as the Prince of Darkness, promoted by adverts starring the author as a Vincent Price lookalike – was bound to focus on the personal and the sensational. The book is damaging to Labour (and to Peter) because the serialisation and the brouhaha around the book presents the picture of a rowing, dysfunctional leadership, more driven by personal ambition than the national interest. It is a misleading account, because it has no perspective on what that government (including Peter) achieved, or why Gordon and Tony disagreed.

The book focuses on the personal relations at the top of Labour. The key event in the book is Tony winning the leadership in 1994. The heart of the book is Gordon and Tony’s poisoned personal relationship, and Gordon’s distrust of Peter after 1994.

The rows were most certainly not the defining picture of the Labour government. Tony and Gordon mostly got on, separately, with driving a range of policy goals with which the other did not interfere. Gordon concentrated on tax credits; the independence of the Bank of England; financial regulation; third-world debt; and global economic governance. Tony’s focus was the Northern Ireland peace process; Kosovo; Sierra Leone; the ‘respect agenda’; the Human Rights Act; Freedom of Information; the minimum wage; sure start; crime; the Supreme Court. Even where there were ugly confrontations between Gordon and Tony on policy like pensions reform, the issue was then resolved.

As a cabinet minister during part of the period when Tony was prime minister, the differences between the prime minister and chancellor had precious little effect on the making of policy in my area. Both were helpful. The fiercest disagreements recorded in the book appear to be about general election strategy. Even there, the two of them simply got on with it, avoiding public disagreement, speaking about different things and different themes. However, the rows did damage Labour, particularly after 2005. But Peter provides no real context for the rows beyond personal animosity.

There is a wider context. If Gordon was going to fight Tony for the leadership, he would have to take him on from a position to his left, and at odds with many of the modernising stances they had jointly adopted before 1994. The speech Gordon made at the Welsh Labour conference in 1994 – after John Smith’s death but before Gordon’s withdrawal – appealed to the core of the party. He chose not to fight in 1994, but the next 13 years for him were devoted to winning the leadership, from that very place: firmly within Labour’s comfort zone.

This was not old Labour but an enlightened left position focused on British and developing world poverty, as well as public sector reform from the viewpoint of the public sector worker rather than the patient, the parent or the pupil. It was a position, not a set of worked-out policies.

Public sector reform was the area where Tony challenged the Labour orthodoxy most, and where they most fell out. For a political party to prosper there needs to be a debate about where the policy envelope must go beyond the borders of the past. Gordon and Tony’s differences reflected the row about those borders. Gordon opposed Tony on foundation hospitals, academies and top-up fees. Tony was seeking to give the many the choices the affluent few have. Gordon aimed to prevent public services losing their altruistic culture by allowing the private sector to deliver services, even if free at the point of delivery.

Within the party, Gordon’s political position was more popular than Tony’s, but Tony personally, until towards the end of his premiership, remained more popular because he was more able to make the sun shine on Labour with the general public. This equilibrium began to unravel in 2006, when, post-Iraq, Tony refused to back a ceasefire in the Lebanon war until much too late.

The very beginning of the book tells the very personal story of Peter’s return to Gordon’s side in 2008. For Peter it is a story about repairing what had been, for a time, the most important personal relationship he had had in politics. The wider untouched context is Gordon’s return, after 14 years of nursing his Labour base, to a more challenging position which he had believed was the only one from which Labour could win. Modernisation involved different things as the years went on. But ultimately it always involved finding a way consistent with Labour values to connect with the public. Seldom can that connection be made without challenging some party sensibilities.

Peter is one of a very small group of the people who contributed most to the three Labour victories, to the things which Labour achieved in power and to a result in 2010 which means we live to fight another day. The Labour party owes him a huge amount for those achievements. Let’s forget about this book.