'Go on, teach the f***er a lesson'

Alastair Campbell once earned his living writing lurid sex tales for a pornographic magazine. Now it can be revealed the latest of Tony Blair's aides has enjoyed a writing career in which sex and swearing feature prominently.

Speech writer and strategy adviser Philip Collins, 36, is the newest and possibly most influential recruit to Mr Blair's inner circle.

The former banker, who is married to a rising star of BBC news, is taking the role previously filled by Andrew Adonis, the new minister for education who was being ennobled today.

However, the Prime Minister can only hope that Mr Collins avoids some of the more earthy passages that crop up in his best-selling and critically acclaimed books.

His debut novel, The Men From The Boys, is the story of two lads, Adam and Kevin, growing up in the working-class town of Bury, Lancashire, and is sprinkled with the kind of gritty language perhaps more often associated with that real northerner Liam Gallagher, or a script for a Quentin Tarantino film.

Take this on page 334: "As soon as Adam's back hit the ground, Kevin waded in with a torrent of vicious punches to the face, to the stomach, to the lower abdomen. 'That's for touching my wife, you posh f***ing c***'." Or this on page 319, when Kevin is getting a dressing down from his boss: "Don't come the bloody innocent with me, you little bastard. I f***ing knew we shouldn't have bothered with a f***ing jailbird ..."

Then there's page 284, where Kevin discovers his wife is seeing another man: "Has he shagged you?" "I'm going." " He's f***ing shagged you, hasn't he? You f***ing slag... You f***ing slag. He's f***ing shagged you already."

Mr Collins's second novel, Bobby Dazzler, tells the story of Georgie Lees, a market-trader and "almost" professional actress. It has the obligatory romp or two, such as this on page 62: "Unblinking and frozen, Georgie unbuttoned her tartan-pleated skirt... a curl of flesh was pushed up over the top of her pale knickers and, in this ungainly position, Georgie Lees stopped.

"Preston had to come forward the five paces that separated them to persuade her to remove the last of her clothes. Georgie eerily said nothing and Preston was forced to pull the knicker elastic himself. His grip slipped and the elastic snapped against the exposed flesh."

Mr Collins's wife is Geeta Guru-Murthy, who presents news bulletins on BBC World, BBC News 24 and on Radio 4, and is the sister of Krishnan Guru-Murthy,
the Channel 4 newsreader. The couple have one child.

Prior to his new appointment to the Prime Minister's inner circle, the Cambridge University graduate had spent five years as director of a think-tank, the Social Market Foundation, transforming it from being a favourite of John Major's in the mid-Nineties to becoming a generator of ideas for New Labour. Before that, Mr Collins was an adviser to Frank Field, the former Labour minister known for his outspoken views on pensions.

All of which makes him a controversial choice to dictate the Prime Minister's policies - and could even make him the subject of the news read by his wife.