Playing the victim card is often seen as a last resort for those desperate to add a sympathetic varnish to their reputations.

While Tony Blair may not mix with the ranks of the desperate, his memoirs appear to portray him as someone keen for others to feel sorry for him.

But his memoirs should not be the place for such self-pity, we would hope for more of a lesson in the art of statesmanship from a former Prime Minister.

Instead, if the revelations of soap opera-style quarrels and excesses with Gordon Brown are anything to go by, it sounds more like the memoirs of a warring couple still desperate to cling on to their fading fame.

The parallels between these pampered 21st century celebrity couples appear uncanny. It is not Tony Blair, election maestro, on show here but the preachy self-absorbed Mr Blair who above all else wants to be loved and remembered – a trait that seems akin to so many of the celebrities in the past decade.

It appears Mr Blair is trying to soften us up for the real meat of the story, so that when he exposes his true failings we might see his as the poor victim, who above all was only trying to be a decent person.

Here in the Westcountry though, the New Labour years will have left us too cynical of him to be drawn by such mind play, and certainly his take on the conception of the Hunting Act that will rile the blood of many of our readers.

Here his cowardice and arrogance compete for attention in a way only Blair could orchestrate.

He was arrogant, in thinking that a short conversation with a hunt mistress while on holiday in Tuscany is enough to allow him to change his mind on the Act, and thinking that the best course of action was to sabotage it.

Cowardly, in that he refused to admit that he was wrong while in office. And cowardly again for not being big enough to rescind the Act, and instead allowing it to hang over the countryside like a bad smell – refusing to admit that it had done neither side of the hunting fence any favours.

Difficult to enforce and expensive to maintain, the Hunting Act will be his damning legacy in the countryside.

Indeed, one would suggest that introducing a law then deliberately sabotaging seems not far short of trying to pervert the course of justice.

He claims that by the end of his introduction he felt "like the damn fox". He ought to be careful if he enters hunting territory this season, as he might be treated like one.

In the passages that address the war in Iraq, he again falls into familiar self-pitying mode, ironic in that the last thing he will achieve is pity. While he does at least come across as sincere when he reveals his battle to come to terms with the number of troops who were sent to their deaths in Iraq, he refuses to admit that he did not have the required justification to take Britain to war.

For that, the families of those who fought in vain have been let down yet again by a man clearly yearning for a legacy to call his own. Perhaps somewhere between the lines of this publication will be the traces of regret that he never managed to forge a legacy that he felt proud to leave Downing Street with.

Perhaps it is while he pursued this goal that he developed the drinking habit. Who knows, maybe while consuming the daily gin, whisky and wine he claims to have drunk while he was Prime Minister he may have found some guilt swilling around the bottom of the glass?

Tony Blair's memoirs suggest that he was a Prime Minister very good at one particular practice, massaging the truth to create a dialogue with the public that few of his peers can claim to rival. Whether, with the Iraq war in particular, this amounted to lying it is difficult to determine.

One fact is true though – there won't be any G and Ts and stiff whiskies flowing in Number 10 tonight. Instead it will be the sound of champagne corks popping, as the true winners of this latest depiction of the New Labour years are the new owners of that particular drinks cabinet.