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Quango - A Political Column

A look at memoirs written by the unmemorable.

Last weekend, the TV studios of Britain were alive with the sound of Alistair 'Interesting' Darling and his sonorous voice. He doesn't mind if you think he's boring, because he's already sold the rights to his new memoirs – 1000 Days At Number 11 – for a six-figure sum.

As is the custom when you sell your serialisation to the Sunday Times, Darling had come to the studios primed with a bunch of juicy bits, front-loading everything worthwhile from his book into a few tasty bullet points. Gordon Brown is – wait for it – not always the happy-go-lucky maverick that his permanently furrowed brow and sore-throat-dog-voice would have you believe. His spending targets for Labour weren't always realistic, which will surprise anyone not currently caught up in the biggest UK recession since WWII.

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Darling went on to confirm that Brown had tried to sack him, and spooled out everything that Blunkett, Clarke, Campbell, Mandelson, Cook, Blair, etc had already exhaustively detailed. The one anecdote that seemed genuinely fascinating was the tale of a civil servant who'd begun peeling an apple during a meeting with Gordon, who then had to face Brown's volcanic wrath. 'What sort of civil service have we inherited,' the nation wondered aloud, 'that it is populated with the sort of people who are too uptight to eat the skin of an apple?' It speaks to a certain creepy hygiene of the mind. Unless the apple was intended to be diced into some sort of Waldorf salad. In which case, what salad selections are the civil service canteens coming up with these days that don't include a decent Waldorf? A nation recoiled in horror.

However tedious they turned out, Darling needed to front-load the juicy bits because, these days, if you take an advance for your memoirs and you don't have three decent juicy-bits, lawyers come to claw all the money back.

Newspaper serialisation is the tail wagging the tedious memoir dog. Publishers pay whopping advances – like the £5milllion doled out to Tony Blair – in the hope that they'll be able to recoup at least half of that instantly with Sunday 'paper serialisation. David Blunkett got £400,000 from the papers for selling his. Which was just as well, as he only managed to sell 4000 copies of his turgid, 850-page tome The Blunkett Tapes: My Life In The Bear Pit; a book which, despite its exhaustive recollections of meetings, events and shopping lists, somehow completely failed to mention the affair he'd been having when he was sacked. It was a breeze block so wildly inaccurate that several politicians soon came forward with evidence proving that they were not at the meetings Blunkett put them at.

'That's what happens when you let a blind man write a book,' I hear you cry, but not us, oh no, as we look to sources other than the disabled for our lulz. Predictably, some of the tastiest schadenfreude is served up by memoir-writing love rivals – Robin Cook received £400,000 for his memoirs, but in those boom-times, his ex-wife also managed to get the 'papers to run extracts from hers detailing what a prick he was. Lacking a great agent, Edwina Currie had to make do with a meagre £150,000 for the biggest revelation of all – that she'd been doing the nasty with that nice Mr Major all those years. Cherie Blair managed to codge £1million in exchange for all those tales about how she forgot her birth control devices when she and Tone went to stay at Balmoral and couldn't figure out how to close her legs. Received wisdom is that her own pre-A Journey book fatally diluted Tony's market-share – knocking his worth down from the £7million he'd been expected to get when the rights went up for auction. Even Sarah Brown got 'a six-figure sum' for her drivelling tales of charity work and designer labels.

Meanwhile, El Gordo's ongoing reverse-Midas touch means that his own book sales rank among the most lamentable in recent history. Beaten in the sales race by his wife, his book about the financial crisis and why he was right all along managed to shift a full 13 copies in its first week. That's 1.857 copies a day, all of which, I am reliably informed, were put down quicker than that aforementioned tedious memoir dog.

GAVIN HAYNES