If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, how are you going to perform at your maximum?”It is very hard, but you’ve got to under-stand that if I’m the captain and I’m portraying an image of, ‘This is hard work, it’s travel, play, travel, play’, then how’s the team going to feel? And I’m tired, I’m knackered. “Dear Deidre, How can I get some one-day runs? Yours, The England Captain.”There was a period of media angst when he fell out with the match referee, Clive Lloyd, during the recent Test series. Lloyd later said he had been “rude and dismissive” at a disciplinary hearing, but Vaughan has risen above it by saying nowt, or at least saying it bland. That is one trick he must have picked up from his predecessor but two, Atherton.”I want to see players enjoy playing for their country, I can’t understand the idea of it being a burden, whether that comes from the Eighties or Nineties or what,” he said.

I just laugh.”I suppose it’s having success at the highest level and being under so much pressure, with all the media and having to make decisions on the pitch. If they go right, people automatically think you’ve got the balls to make decisions for everything.” Making the hard decisions appeals to Vaughan. Not decisions like whether to bat on a flat pitch – which anybody could do, as he observed – but those when it might go horribly wrong. “It makes me chuckle.” This chuckling and laughing malarkey is where he might differ from Hussain and other predecessors. The job will not wear him down to the point where it ceases to be enjoyable.He reads the pundits, of course (“Show me a player who doesn’t read the media and I’ll show you a liar,” said Michael Atherton recently), but only intermittently, and his favourite remains Dear Deidre, the agony column in the Sun. In a little under two years, Vaughan has taken it a huge stride further.

Under his stewardship, England have won five Test series out of seven, including their first in the West Indies for 36 years and in South Africa for 40 years.The one-day side are more of a work in progress, as this seven-match series against South Africa has amply demonstrated, but they reached the Champions Trophy final last September, beating Australia en route for the first time in 14 matches.The job has clearly affected Vaughan – “Of course it changes your life” – and some aspects of it have bemused this essentially straightforward Yorkshireman, who was born in Lancashire “Yeah, people look at you differently. You get recognised wherever you go, though not to the state I guess where a footballer would But even on holidays people know who you are And I’ll tell you what they do as well. People will ring you from business and other networks of life I know nothing about and ask for your opinions, and they actually go on your word if you have one. Hussain, through the sheer force of a driven, dedicated and obsessive personality, ensured that English cricket stopped being a laughing stock and made it respectable again. And Edward Heath duly went on to win.Oddly, perhaps, Mr Blair is not, by most accounts, nearly as confident as Wilson.

But then, the Conservatives are even less sure of themselves than they were when they won so unexpectedly in 1970. “It was all too much for Peter Mandelson and to a lesser extent Tony,” complains Hyman “We started back-tracking .. We would never again make a head-on assault on the right. We would return to progressive politics by stealth.”Hyman quotes Blair’s response in a note in April 2000: “There is no easily identifiable group – saving perhaps the hereditary peers and that is very limited – that can be described as ‘holding Britain back’. To invent one, or worse single out some group just to have one, will cause more problems than it solves. It doesn’t feel right to me.”The 2003 conference speech was written in a very different situation, in which Blair had plenty of enemies, mostly among natural Labour supporters. Hyman sought to use the speech to define a “new phase” of New Labour.

But Blair and Hyman had rather different views of what the new phase meant For Blair it meant intensifying the revolution. For Hyman, worried about the shortage of revolutionaries, it was a chance, after six years in power and having established its economic competence, for the party to be more openly social-democratic.Hyman did not leave Downing Street because he lost that argument, but this is where his story becomes really interesting Politicians often try to find out what “real” life is like They listen to focus groups. They visit schools, hospitals and the set of Coronation Street. Some of the less busy ones go on the dole for a week or take the place of lone parents for television programmes.