Others see him as a cautionary example of how anyone - even someone as intellectually capable (he was named recently as one of Britain's top 100 public intellectuals) and culturally sophisticated as the broadcaster, arts executive, novelist, champion of science and TV star - can turn into a blundering naive when they venture outside their area of competence, however broad, as in Bragg's case, that may be.

But is conspiracy or cock-up the explanation behind his comments? There was much talk of "the new-found ruthlessness being displayed by the Blair machine" and dark remarks about how this was not the first time that the labyrinthine saga of the Prime Minister's grip on the Labour leadership had been given "a helpful shove in the right direction by someone from the Blair inner circle".

People have been looking at Melvyn Bragg in two ways since.

To some he is a New Labour schemer involved in a Machiavellian plan to boost sympathy for Tony Blair among any backbenchers still toying with the notion that Gordon Brown might make a better party leader.

The latter had the double distinction of being adapted for television and winning the Literary Review Bad Sex Prize.

The Cumbria that Bragg commemorates, sometimes wryly, sometimes with intense devotion, centres on his home town of Wigton, which often appears as Thurston.

Civic pride is not lacking: there is a handsome memorial fountain in the market place and a number of notable 19th-century buildings.

"You are a working peer." Knowing the insatiable appetite of cable TV, the polymath agreed. Next morning, his comments were splashed all over the front pages with the revelation that his friend Tony Blair very nearly quit this year over a family crisis which had put him under "colossal strain".Former pupils of the school include TV presenter Melvyn Bragg and BBC newsreader Anna Ford.There were approximately 1400 pupils aged 11–18 attending Nelson Thomlinson as of the 2014-15 academic year.Certain newspapers, frustrated at having to restrain themselves in the spring when rumours about the Blairs' domestic crisis swept media circles, fuelled this view.The Maryport & Carlisle Railway (M&CR) was an English railway company formed in 1836 which built and operated a small but eventually highly profitable railway to connect Maryport and Carlisle in Cumbria, England.There were many small collieries in the area and efficient access to the harbour at Maryport was important.The western end, connecting the majority of the collieries to Maryport opened in 1840 and the line was completed throughout to Carlisle in 1845.Until recently, Bragg was regarded more as a TV presenter who wrote novels than as a major novelist in his own right.But his literary stock has risen substantially with his two most recent novels, The Soldier's Return (1999) and A Son of War (2001).The school also has an excellent record of students going on to study at Oxbridge, with 5 students taking up places in 2011, and 6 taking up places in 2012. The school's Young Enterprise teams have performed well in the Young Enterprise competition over the past few years. Melvyn Bragg was born and brought up in Cumbria and has used it as the setting for several of his books - from the historical novel The Maid of Buttermere (1978), to the modern love story A Time to Dance (1990).As with many older British Secondary schools, The Nelson Thomlinson School has a prefect system drawn from the Sixth Form.However, instead of one Head Prefect or a Head Boy & Girl pair, there are five Head Prefects who each take charge on a particular day of the week.Conceived as the first instalments of a longer saga, the books tell the story of his own post-war childhood in the thinnest of fictional disguises.They are set in Wigton and recapture in loving detail the texture of daily life there in the 1940s and 1950s. A landscape of contrasts - and sharp ones, at that.