Memoir packed with brutal asides about Trump that largely have the ring of truth

“I don’t recall seeing him laugh, ever ... his apparent inability to do so ... is really very sad in a leader and a little scary in a president,” writes James Comey, the FBI director fired by Donald Trump last May. In his damning new memoir and broadside against the president, he blasts him as a shabby Mafia don who, he thinks, quite possibly cavorted with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel suite in 2013.

The claims made in the book have enraged the 45th incumbent, who, in lurid Sopranos-speak, has branded Comey a lying “slimeball”.

A Higher Loyalty is peppered with bitchy asides about Comey’s former boss, whom he paints as an insecure ignoramus baffled by words like “calligrapher” and who conducts important White House receptions like an episode of The Price Is Right.

Comey is, however, as a A Higher Loyalty demonstrates again and again, at heart a Christian moralist. A Higher Loyalty is at once an earnest, exculpatory confession — justifying his actions in controversies from torture and surveillance programmes under George W Bush to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails during the 2016 election — and a jeremiad against a national leader “untethered to the truth”.

One of Comey’s overriding missions is the long-term safeguarding of the FBI’s independence from being “waist-deep in the s***” of the Washington crossfire, to rebuild public trust in such institutions. But there’s also an implicit hope that Trump, whom he describes as a “forest fire”, will finally immolate himself for provably obstructing justice.

Trump’s attempts to sway the inquiry into Michael Flynn — the former national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying about conversations with the Russian ambassador — are here laid out in disquieting detail. Trump’s impulsive decision to fire Comey unleashed a potentially lethal nemesis in the form of special counsel Robert Mueller, who may finally bring him down.

A lot depends, on reading the book, whether Comey’s versions of various events ring true. Mostly they do and Comey emerges as a decent, well-meaning and thoughtful public servant willing to reflect on his mistakes.

If Comey is right, Trump’s reign might be reduced to ashes sooner than we think.