What the politicians and the journalists have told you is that in his diaries Mark Latham has written a bitter, biased, scurrilous, self-centred, self-aggrandising and ultimately self-destructive book. They are right. What they will not tell you is that, in addition, Latham has produced the most intelligent, perceptive, honest and absorbing book about Australian politics since Don Watson’s Keating masterpiece, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart. The publication of The Latham Diaries raises many troubling ethical questions. Yet in the end these seem less important than the contribution he has made to an understanding not only of the dilemmas of federal Labor during the Howard years but, more deeply, of the sicknesses of the democratic political culture in the age of material plenty. Once Latham has been discredited, and perhaps destroyed, some citizens will notice that the Diaries – for all their grandiosity, occasional cruelty and vituperative madness – are considerably more important in their implication than they have been led to believe.