After Tony Blair leaves No 10 tomorrow he'll probably have time to put his feet up and get into a good book - and some may be very useful as he reflects on his past ten years in power. Mr Blair is heavily tipped for the United Nations. These are a few books he needs to read en route.

Given the mass of legislation new Labour has passed over the past decade, I Fought the Law should be top of the list. Dan Kieran has compiled an entertaining account of trying to be a law-abiding citizen with so many laws to transgress. "Back in 1992 when Tony Blair was a lowly member of the Opposition he pledged that Labour would be ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’; few could have guessed that picnicking was what he had in mind." Kieran begins his journey into Blair’s Britain recalling people who had been arrested for "eating a picnic in Parliament Square”.

As Mr Blair reads this very funny book, he may stifle a laugh as he realises how ludicrously some of his initiatives have been applied. Chief among them are antisocial behaviour orders. Caroline Shepherd, for instance, "was given an ASBO for walking around her own house in her underwear . . . David Boag, a fan of An American Werewolf in London, likes to go into his garden and howl like a wolf. He got an ASBO for that and was given a four-month jail term over Christmas” for howling in breach of it.

Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason may have been considering some of Mr Blair’s enthusiastic law-making, but it applies itself to something far more important. He discusses how politicians have less concern for the truth than achieving their own political objectives. Central to his argument is the manner in which the Bush Administration took his country, and Mr Blair and Britain, to war with Iraq. He speaks of how politicians manipulated public fear to achieve their objectives. He also tackles the executive desire to influence the independence of the judiciary – “rarely in prior American history . . . has there been anything like the assault on the independence of the judiciary that we have seen during the Bush-Cheney years”, he concludes. Efforts made by the Americans to curtail the discretion of judges in matters such as habeas corpus have resonances to new Labour’s constant assault upon our own judges. On reading this book, Mr Blair may remember where he got his ideas from.

Many people, including for example Neil Kinnock, the former leader of Labour, have commented that Mr Blair has been unduly impressed by uniform and position. The third book for Mr Blair’s table should be Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect, an essential guide to choosing your friends. It asks: how can honest people be induced to behave illegally? How can good people become perpetrators of evil? In a fascinating experiment Professor Zimbardo placed a random group of ordinary students in a mock prison, allotting them roles of warders or inmates. The study was terminated when the warders became increasingly sadistic.

A pioneer of social experiments such as these, the professor exposes the raw dynamics of human relationships and concludes that “we can learn to become good or evil regardless of our genetic inheritance, personality or family legacy”. He refers to the concept of “hostile imagination”, wherein leaders create “the enemy” with a process of stereotyped and dehumanised images, notching up the fear and perceived threat causing “reasonable people [to] act irrationally, independent people act in mindless conformity and peaceful people act as warriors”. He describes the route to genocide, but there are many variants of the ultimate extreme. Variants Mr Blair may contemplate presently playing out about extensions to 28-day detentions and imprisonment without trial.

Finally, for light relief, the outgoing Prime Minister might like a novel. Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist would be the most appropriate. The central character is a 26-year-old woman swept up as a prime suspect after bombs are discovered in a local stadium. A story of how hysteria can cloud reason and how fear can defeat morality, as one protagonist puts it, “. . . it was possible, after all, to civilise something as barbaric as warfare with the Geneva Convention, and now we needed a Geneva Convention on how we might conduct torture in a civilised fashion”.

I Fought the law by Dan Kieran, Published by Bantam Press, £9.99

The Assault on Reason by Al Gore, Published by Bloomsbury, £20

The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo, Published by Rider Books, £18.99

The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan, Published by Atlantic Books, £14.99

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