:This is all WP:OR. Geoffrey Wheatcroft is a distinguished journalist, historian and reviewer. He is reporting what the books under review (Blair's 'A Journey', Mandelson's 'The Third Man,' Rawnsley's 'The End of the Party' and Brian Jones's 'Failing Intelligence') report. Paywall? Well, I can copy out the relevant paragraphs, since I subscribe to the NYRB and have that copy. 
 : If you reexamine your edits, and the summaries provided when writing about 'playing fast and loose', that idiom looks like an accurate projection of what you did there.  Without apparently consulting the source, or evaluating where it came from (NYRB) you went ahead, kept the source, but rephrased the language in a way that makes the source unrecognizable. I kept strictly to the wording of that source. You say it, or Wheatcroft, or both got things wrong? That's your opinion, and has no place on wikipedia.