Hillary Clinton’s autobiography seems destined to join her husband’s – in a bin marked ‘Free’

Last year a Washington-based journalist called Mark Leibovich wrote This Town, a book whose thesis was, roughly, that Washington-based journalists are terrible people. Leibovich’s book exemplified a trend among self-described Beltway insiders who decry as venial and insipid the trivialities they spend their lives reporting.

Sounds a bit precious, I know, not to mention suicidal. But it’s supposed to be waggish and endearing and ironical. The latest victim of this coprophagic tendency is Hard Choices, Hillary Clinton’s third book. Barely a week after its publication, with over a million copies in print, it has already been written off by the hacks who spent months doing potted F.R. Leavis numbers on the title and dust-jacket, microanalysing every sentence in the excerpts and leaked chapters carefully spooned out by the Clinton mafia.

Oh, well. Someone has to review it. It’s a book, after all, and in the months and years to come we will grow accustomed to seeing its grey bulk, first in airport newsagents, then in public libraries, and finally in second-hand bookshops, like the one in which I found my (signed) copy of Bill Clinton’s autobiography — in a bin marked ‘Free’. Best get familiar, one thinks.

Hard Choices is a memoir of Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state under Barack Obama. It is organised not chronologically but thematically, with groan-inducing obviousness, around the ‘tough decisions’ she claims to have taken during that time, most of them involving places like Dakar, Ulan Bator, Astana and Port Moresby.

At first glance we have what reads like a bold generic experiment, the first world- travelogue-cum-management-tips tome. Really, though, this is a book about politics, specifically one about elections. It begins in 2008, with Clinton losing to Obama in the Democratic primary, and ends more or less now, with her being coy about whether she’ll run again in 2016.