I was not one of the privileged few who got an advance copy of his much-splashed autobiography, but candid or dull, cautious or titillating, he has done the country a service by giving us his version of events. We journalists may write the first rough draft of history, but politicians write the real stuff.
If Mr Advani and his aides have made a critical error it is this: journalists and editors have been segregated into "friends" and "enemies". The friends are to be indulged, the enemies are to be shunned. This apartheid has turned out to be counter-productive. It ensures a complete freeze. As any novice spin doctor will tell you, the trick is to convert enemies into friends. The friends have already been won, so one should pay restricted attention to them and calculatedly reach out to the enemies. The prime minister-in-waiting often complains about his image problem and blames the media for painting him as a "hardliner". This may well be true, but it is also true that the cause of the problem could be the way Mr Advani has handled his press relations.
