A few weeks ago, John Major came to my college on invitation by the Master. His visit was remarkably unremarkable apart from one question taken from the floor: ‘What do you think of those who publish gossipy memoirs?’
He answered, rather irritably, that he thought them unfair: not without due reason. Since news of his affair with Edwina Currie broke, he has had to weather all the media sniggering that he perhaps thought he’d left behind with No. 10.
He even expressed some sympathy for his former adversary, Gordon Brown, since at that very moment, Brown, on top of a crushing by-election defeat, was having to field unwanted questions of his own as three different memoirs – by Cherie Blair, Lord Levy and John Prescott – were released in just a few days.
All of them have some dirt to dish on the current Prime Minister, which can only make his present situation even more unpleasant. But why do they do it?
Well, the theory is that authors write memoirs, then auction them off to the highest-bidding publisher, sometimes in unfinished form. It’s rumoured that Tony Blair got a £4.6m advance on his; a good investment for someone now semi-retired.
Then come the newspaper serialisations of juicy titbits, which can fetch up to £200,000 extra. These serialisations sell newspapers as well as books, although the formula is not always perfect: Hillary Clinton’s offering tanked despite huge media coverage, perhaps because she refused to even touch on subjects that she hadn’t already spoken about at length, such as her husband’s affair.
Others, however, like Cherie Blair, publish to ‘set the record straight’. Cherie claims that Tony didn’t stand down before 2007, as he had promised Brown, because he feared Brown would abandon his reforms on foundation hospitals and city academies – which, as all good politics students could surmise, is perhaps not the entire truth.
People also seek to justify their place in history, as Prescott attempts with his account of his alleged peacemaking role between the warring Ministers, and also to settle a score. Burying the hatchet – in your opponent’s back – and making a tidy sum out of it: the perfect occupation for a retired politician.
But political memoirs have to be saleable. Hillary learned that even though you may have lived through interesting times, that doesn’t equal interested buyers: it’s old news. By contrast, books published on the back of current events, such as Alastair Campbell’s infamous diaries, do very well, although it remains to be seen how well the current crop fares.
Cherie’s memoir in fact wasn’t due till October, but with the intense media pressure building on Brown right now, the memoir could be a winner. But a word of warning: however they try and justify it, politicians are writing, for money, from their own point of view, and as a species they lie more than most. Don’t believe everything you read in their pages.
