LONDON: First-day sales for Tony Blair's memoir suggest his donation to the Royal British Legion might well exceed the pound stg. 4 million ($6.8m) advance he has already promised to hand on to the veterans' charity.
The British book chain Waterstone's said the former prime minister's memoir, A Journey, had enjoyed the strongest one-day sales for an autobiographical work. It sold more on its first day than fellow Labour politician Peter Mandelson's The Third Man - the hit of the northern summer - notched up in its first three weeks.
"It's outsold anything you care to mention: Russell Brand, Peter Kay, Dawn French, even (David) Beckham," Waterstone's spokesman Jon Howells said yesterday.
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| A reader engrossed in the French edition of the book. AFP |
Neill Denny, editor-in-chief of The Bookseller magazine, said the book could enjoy hardback sales of up to 400,000 in Britain and might sell even more in the US, where it went on sale overnight. Canada, Australia and continental Europe also represented valuable potential markets and could help bring total hardback sales up to about a million copies. "It's not really a beach read - but there could be another million sold if (the paperback is) well received by the reading public," he said.
Mr Blair announced last month that he would hand all his earnings from the book to the Royal British Legion. The donation was mocked by critics of the Iraq war, who said Mr Blair was paying "blood money".
Although the memoirs could never compete with former Tory MP Alan Clarke's diaries for scurrilous revelations, the former prime minister ensured that they were not without spice, detailing the lure of naughty encounters for public figures. He revealed he could not bring himself to fire former deputy prime minister John Prescott over his liaison with his diary secretary, describing the affair as a "silly sex scandal".
On politics and sex, he wrote: "It's a strange thing . . . people have often said to me that power is an aphrodisiac and some women - politics still being male-dominated - would come on to politicians in a way they would never dream of with anyone else.
"I suppose it must be true since, let's face it, most politicians are definitely on the debit side of the good-looks ledger."
He said what was interesting was why politicians took the risk of having an affair. Politicians live with pressure. They have to be immensely controlled to get anywhere, watch what they say and do; and behave . . . Your free-bird instincts want to spring you from that prison of self-control.
"Then there is the moment of encounter, so exciting, so naughty, so lacking in self-control. Suddenly you are transported out of your world of intrigue and issues and endless machinations and the serious piled on the serious, and just put on a remote desert island of pleasure."
In the French edition of the memoir, Mr Blair declares his lifelong love affair with France and describes how a French girlfriend once told him to be less British and learn to enjoy pleasure.
In the French preface to Memoires, the local title of the book, he also talks of his admiration for former French president Jacques Chirac and gives advice to the incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, on how to be re-elected.
Mr Blair worked in a bar in Paris as a student. "One day, I fell in love with a Frenchwoman. She was passionate. I was a little . . . English. I thought I would never manage to understand her. She thought it was not necessary to try. 'Stop thinking and learn to have pleasure,' she would tell me often. On reflection, perhaps she was right."
He writes with affection for Mr Chirac, who rallied global opposition to the 2003 Iraq invasion.
Mr Blair recalls how the president was teased in front of the Queen at a banquet at the Gleneagles Group of Eight summit in July 2005. Mr Chirac had just made news over a conversation with then Russian president Vladimir Putin in which he said of the British: "How can you trust a nation which has such bad food?" When Mr Chirac began eating the first course, Junichiro Koizumi, the then Japanese prime minister, shouted across the table in English: "Excellent English food, isn't it, Jacques?" Mr Chirac started apologising to the Queen, denying he had made the remark. "What is he saying?" the Queen asked. She was told of the episode. Mr Koizumi continued to tease Mr Chirac throughout the meal "to the point that I thought that Jacques was going to grab his aide-de-camp's pistol and shoot him".
Mr Blair also recalls laughing when Mr Chirac started reading a magazine on oriental art at three in the morning when he was chairing the deadlocked EU summit in Nice in December 2000.
Mr Blair also pays tribute to Mr Chirac for advising him to break off the Gleneagles summit and go back to London after the July 2005 bomb attacks.
On Mr Sarkozy, Mr Blair says it is essential to stick to his 2007 election campaign promises. If the President fails to implement his promised reforms, he will lose the 2012 presidential election, Mr Blair says. "Public opinion will forgive him his supposedly luxurious lifestyle . . . It will not forgive him for forgetting why he was elected."
Courtesy The Times
Animal' Blair opens up on sex and politics
LONDON (AFP) - Tony Blair's memoirs out Wednesday concern more than just affairs of state -- Britain's ex-premier also gives intimate details about his wife.
In “A Journey”, Blair writes candidly of his “animal” feelings for his wife Cherie one night when he was on the brink of going for the leadership of the Labour party after the death of the party leader John Smith in 1994.
“That night she cradled me in her arms and soothed me; told me what I needed to be told; strengthened me; made me feel that what I was about to do was right,” Blair writes of Cherie, with whom he now has four children.
“On that night of 12 May 1994, I needed that love Cherie gave me, selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength, I was an animal following my instinct, knowing I would need every ounce of emotional power and resilience to cope with what lay ahead.”
He also pays tribute to his wife for her composure when she gave birth to their fourth child in 2001 -- the first to be born to a sitting British prime minister in 150 years -- adding: “There are times when I am in awe of that woman.” |
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