Morning:
8°c
One book of memoirs has already been genuinely popular this year - Jordan: Pushed to the Limit, by Katie Price. It's her third ghosted autobiography so far and she's not even 30. This one's not quite up to the mark of her first two, mostly relating medical mishaps and marital rows, but she's very decently promised to put a bit more sex in her fourth instalment. Anyway, more than 270,000 people have bought it in hardback since it came out in February.
Now we have Cherie Blair's autobiography, for which she has reportedly been paid £1 million. Her publishers must believe they are going to sell Jordan-sized quantities. They are wrong. I think.
It is a strange fact that no failure in the sales of political memoirs ever seems to discourage politicians, publishers and journalists from becoming over-excited about these books. Not even so legendary a dud as David Blunkett's memoirs - he was paid £400,000 and sold fewer than 4,000 copies - seems to have any effect.
Those who are thrilled by proximity to power and government find it incomprehensible that most people are not so interested. If you try to tell them otherwise, it's as if they can't hear you. If they manage to register what you're saying, they are simply offended that such heresy should even be expressed.
Yet it's obviously true. Most people just aren't that interested in politicians, their achievements, their opinions, their personal lives, any of it. They'd rather read about people off the telly, sports stars, comedians, singers - almost anybody else.
For with a politician's memoirs, once the news stories have been publishedin the serialisation, what's left? The book itself is usually just a kind of unfortunate residue, more to be scraped off than snapped up.
It is intimacy and honesty in the writing that makes memoirs and diaries permanently treasurable. Then, the life need not be of any public significance or at all contemporary to be fascinating. That's why the diaries of, for example, Frances Partridge and James Lees-Milne, Pepys and Kilvert, are so addictive - and why Alan Clark's Diaries are the only modern politician's memoir one could possibly read, let alone re-read, for pleasure.
But genuine intimacy and honest disclosure, rather than Cherie's rather awkward revelations, are rarely found in successful politicians, by definition. Politicians do not thrive by introspection. An internal absence drives many of them into public life. They are not naturally great memoirists.
Perhaps Cherie will prove an exception. Now that we have the book, rather than just extracts, we can see for ourselves. In the meantime, we can enjoy the idea that her disclosures demean the legal profession. Only another lawyer could ever have thought of saying that.
Reader views (2)
Please leave Cherie alone!
- Jenny Waldron, London, England, 16/05/2008 19:32
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But Cherie is not a politician, is she? She just happened to marry a man who became a politician, and then the Prime Minister. I agree with your view that before people rush to judgement, based on a few extracts, they should read the book in its entirety, and then decide. It might surprise them.
- Val Daniels, Mijas Costa. Spain, 16/05/2008 17:18
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