CHERIE BLAIR'S MEMOIRS ARE quite toe-curling in their candour. She has complained for years about press intrusion and declining media standards but now she has the temerity to invade our privacy with a series of unedifying revelations about her sex life. Do we really need to know that her son Leo was conceived after a "bitterly cold" visit to Balmoral? Or that she failed to pack her "contraceptive equipment" for that particular trip?
And what about invading Leo's privacy? The poor boy will never be allowed to forget that he was a Balmoral baby. Such tawdry confessions you would expect out of the mouth of Katie Price, but not from a QC and former prime ministerial consort. Thank
goodness she spared us details about what "equipment" she uses. We should be grateful for small mercies. Unless she is saving up that disclosure for a further instalment. It would be interesting to hear what the Pope has to say on the matter.
The fashion for over-sharing has contaminated other political autobiographies. We have had to stomach John Prescott's bulimic confession, for example, in recent weeks. The former deputy prime minister no doubt expects retrospective sympathy for his binge-eating. But it surely would have been more honest and courageous to have owned up to the condition when he was still in power.
Prescott always insisted while he was in office that his relationship with Tracey Temple was entirely a private matter. But now he has a book to sell he is only too happy to talk about "the affair".
"But I'm not going to say anything about Tracey," he adds sanctimoniously, before going on to bleat about press inaccuracies in chronicling their tryst. When Temple published her own memoir two years ago Prezza complained she was motivated by a "desire to maximise financial gain". Prezza, take note, was paid around £300,000 for his revelations.
Political memoirs used to be a salacious-free zone but now they, too, have been infected by the true confessions virus. Every picturesque misfortune – be it bulimia, an affair or a miscarriage – is deployed to maximise financial gain and arouse a prurient readership. The danger is that future politicians might be tempted to overegg the pudding.
In a strange way we have David Blunkett to blame for the current parlous state of affairs. The former Home Secretary didn't mention his lover Kimberly Quinn once in his memoir and, as a result, the book bombed in the shops. It was so dull, indeed, that it was used as a cautionary tale for other would-be political memoirists. But it seems that Prezza and Cherie have now gone to the other extreme.
The bar for political memoirs has been set unfeasibly high. How on earth is Tony Blair going to compete?
The full article contains 470 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
