The Bookseller.com

17th May 2008

Anthony Horowitz's Snakehead is published in Walker paperback on 10th April.

Political suicide

18.04.08

They were all there in Clerkenwell, just up the road from where I live, last month: Menzies Campbell, David Blunkett, Claire Short and Paddy Ashdown. My local Books Etc was closing down and the pile of unsold political memoirs could have stopped the traffic.

Whether at 20%, 30% or 50% off—frankly they couldn't give them away and it struck me that all political careers don't just end in failure. They end in autobiographies too.
It baffles me why publishers continue to lay out large sums for books that nobody wants to read. Take The Blunkett Tapes: My Life in the Bear Pit (Bloomsbury, 2006). We may admire Blunkett for overcoming so many challenges in his life but his career ended in disgrace—and his book leapt immediately to the top of Private Eye's worst sellers chart. Menzies Campbell may have fared hardly better with his excitingly entitled My Autobiography (Hodder, 2008) which underwhelmed most of the critics.

"I see my life as one of experience and not of achievement," he wrote. "That it should interest others at all is a surprise." I couldn't have put it better myself. Politicians are superficially interesting while they have power over us. The moment they've gone, they have all the resonance of a Sudoku puzzle that's been filled in.

Of course, some of them can write. Roy Jenkins, David Owen and Denis Healey wrote engaging books. Boris Johnson, before someone castrated him for the Mayor of London race, had great style. And political memoirs can be successful as Alastair Campbell proved with The Blair Years (Random, 2007), even if it was published with the odd boast that he had deliberately left out every­thing we really wanted to read.

But right now the Tories have a 16-point lead in the polls and it really looks as though New Labour could soon be over. And what do we have to look forward to in the years to come? The return of Cherie and Tony Blair, that's what. Cherie has signed a £1m deal with Little, Brown but more sickening still is the alleged £6m Tony is getting from ­Random House. Is there anyone who wants to go back over the rights and wrongs of Iraq, the weapons of mass destruction, the Hutton Report, the lies, the spin? Is there anyone who thinks Tony will offer us any more than endless self-justification? Do this gruesome twosome deserve such huge financial rewards after what they've put us through?

One day, I'm sure, their books will turn up on the discount pile. But—really—it still isn't punishment enough.

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