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Friday 8 August 2008

The serial killers (The Guardian)

I have a piece in the Guardian today about political memoirs. Here's an extract:

According to the rumours, Cherie Blair has received around a million pounds for her book and Prescott half a million. Nice work if you can get it, and lubricant enough to prise open the most tightly shut mouth.

But even if the Prescott family's other options for securing an income are somewhat more limited than the Blairs' - Cherie Blair is at the pinnacle of her lucrative profession, with a high-earning husband, while Prescott has no discernible skills to offer and a wife who does not work - it's not true that money is the only factor behind political memoirs. The first insider accounts of the Blair government, after all, came from Jonathan Powell, Blair's former chief of staff, and Lord Levy, his former fundraiser. Powell's advance will not have been huge, and he now has a well-paid job at Morgan Stanley bank. And Lord Levy is already a multimillionaire. Neither needs the money.

What they want is a hearing. Cherie Blair, Powell and Levy have had one thing in common for the past 11 years: they were regularly attacked but they kept - mostly - silent. Now Tony Blair is out of office the rules have changed, and they want to put their side. I suspect that they'd each have paid a publisher to produce their books if that had been the only option.

As for Prescott: far from keeping silent, his mangled syntax seemed to be a non-stop mechanism for noise production. But even in his case, I'm sure that putting his own side of things was important in his decision to publish.

...The real damage of such revelations is usually in the timing. Cherie Blair's extracts appeared on Saturday out of thin air - the book was expected in October. But when better than now to capitalise on Gordon Brown's collapse? In 1991, Norman Fowler published a famously dull memoir, Ministers Decide. It sank with barely a trace. Had he published it before Margaret Thatcher left office, while she was in political decline, even his modest criticisms would have had an impact.

My book was due to be published in the spring of 2005 but when news of Blunkett's affair broke (to my chagrin, as I had the details), I told the publishers that if we went for it now, we would have a triumph; if we stuck to the planned publication date, we would have a turkey, as the home secretary would be long gone by then. And so I rushed to finish it, the Daily Mail brought forward the serialisation, and 10 days later it was in the shops.

The key to these books is the serialisation. They turn a book into a news story. And they provide the real money behind the mega-deal advances. I made some money from sales but almost all my advance came from the serialisation. The same will be true for Cherie Blair and Prescott.

You can be sure that both of them will profess astonishment at the fuss being made. Those who use such books to wound or settle scores rarely accept responsibility for their actions. Blunkett's office, for instance, expressed anger and bewilderment at the whole thing, saying they had no idea what was in my book or that it was being brought forward.

Out of courtesy, I had contacted them to tell them it was coming out early, and precisely when each extract would appear. As for the content: months before, I had sent them the first draft and two of his staff had gone over it with me word for word, asking me to take some comments out - each of which I did (they have never appeared anywhere, and were far, far worse than anything which I published). They signed off on every other dot and comma.

You don't need me to tell you that, when it comes to political memoirs, there's always a hidden story.

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