Jack Straw has trousered well north of £100,000 in extra-parliamentary earnings since the last election. A commodity trader, a private equity house and even a military thinktank have all paid handsomely for the peripatetic Blackburn MP’s services, as Obiter has recounted.

The cherry on the cake, however, is a book deal for the erstwhile justice secretary’s autobiography, Last Man Standing - Memoirs of a Political Survivor. This has earned him a ‘signature advance’ of £30,750 - only a quarter of the total eventually due. ‘As a small boy in Epping Forest, Jack Straw could never have imagined that one day he would become Britain’s lord chancellor,’ his publisher burbles excitedly.

Quick, down to Waterstones! Or perhaps not. Political memoirs are rarely mines of literary gold. Who now remembers Michael Heseltine’s Life in the Jungle, Norman Fowler’s Ministers Decide or Gillian Shephard’s peerless Shephard’s Watch (que?).

And then there was Jim Callaghan’s Time and Chance and Ted Heath’s The Course of My Life. These leaden tomes were memorably described by the 1970s chronicler Dominic Sandbrook as evoking an ‘unremittingly gloomy world of inedible state banquets and interminable economic summits, the pages sucked dry of any life, zest or colour’.

Perhaps Straw will surprise us yet.