The wealthiest scribe in the world …?
It took just twenty days after Tony Blair left office for speculation about his memoirs to hit the papers.
Two weeks ago, the news broke that the former Prime Minister, now Special Envoy to the Middle East, had instructed leading US lawyer Robert Barnett to negotiate a publishing deal for his political memoirs. Barnett, who secured a whopping £8 million advance for Bill Clinton’s ‘My Life,’ will now have the task of playing Murdoch-owned Harper Collins off against competing publisher Random House to secure the deal for Blair. The negotiation will be a sensitive one to navigate for Barnett – Blair owes a lot to Murdoch for his support during his Downing Street years, but Random House Chief Executive Gail Rebuck is married to Philip Gould, one of the architects of the New Labour project.
Aside from this though, will Blair’s memoirs be worth reading? James Callaghan, Harold Wilson and Clement Attlee all wrote fairly uninspiring autobiographies, and Alistair Campbell’s diaries, published earlier this year, were criticised for being overly-sanitised. In her two volumes’ worth of autobiography, Maggie Thatcher only admitted to one mistake – not letting universities have more freedom. Blair, who has famously refused to apologise for taking the country to war in Iraq, might well go down a similar road, providing a glossy, anodyne version of events that any monkey could write. This is made all the more possible by the fact that Blair claims not to have kept a diary during his Downing Street years, making those convenient memory blanks during tricky moments more probable.
Aside from the fact that he once told the former Labour MP Lord Radice that he would never write a memoir, the decision to put pen to paper must have been a difficult one for Blair. First, recent Government insiders such as Christopher Meyer and Lance Price have taken a fairly comprehensive kicking both from former colleagues and the media for their “mercenary” behaviour. Second, he’ll want to be careful that his memoirs do not make life difficult for Labour and provide an open goal for the Tories. Another reason, then, for Blair to play it safe with his autobiography, particularly with regard to his turbulent relationship with Gordon Brown.
But there is one factor that must have made it that much easier for TB to put in the call to Robert Barnett. Whether or not they actually provide any insight on life in Number Ten over the last decade, Blair’s memoirs will sell in rainforest-destroying numbers. And this opportunity to generate vast amounts of cash must be the biggest factor guiding Blair down the memoir path. The mortgage on his £3.5 million Connaught Square property was secured in the expectation of Croesus-like future wealth, and the £8 million advance should certainly come in handy in terms of making those £250,000 a year repayments on the house. At root then, it seems Blair really is what he always said he was - a “pretty straightforward kind of guy,” working to pay the mortgage.
So, when will we be able to read our former Leader’s pearls of wisdom? In terms of the actual publication date, sources close to Blair have said the memoirs are “years away.” Moreover, Blair has allegedly told his successor in Number 10 that he will not publish anything until after the next general election. But we all know how much importance he attaches to promises to Brown, so they could be hitting our bookshelves sooner rather than later.