James Comey likens Trump to a mafia boss. Trump, grandly enthroned behind “a large wooden obstacle”, humbles Comey by assigning him to a child-sized chair, from which his bony knees protrude to prod the presidential desk. Embraced by the diminutive Loretta Lynch, Obama’s attorney general, he feels her head nudging his navel. Wearing resoled shoes that boost him by half an inch, he miscalculates how far he needs to duck and bangs his head on the lintel of a door as he enters a solemn White House conclave, which leaves him trying to finesse a trickle of blood from his skull during a meeting with George W Bush.

His height makes him an awkward fit for the smaller-scaled world the rest of us occupy, and his memoir abounds in clumsy physical upsets. Comey, I suspect, feels an affinity with that aspirational obelisk. In this book, before his ejection from the FBI, he occasionally looks out of his office window on Pennsylvania Avenue, bypasses the luxury hotel that Trump has opened blocks from the White House, and ponders the distant Washington monument, a pristine marble shaft that points at the sky. S tanding 6ft 8in tall, James Comey – “the FBI giraffe” as he calls himself – has made a career out of seeing over the heads of lesser men, his eyes fixed on glimmering legal ideals of probity and propriety.

A higher loyalty truth lies and leadership