Then publishers agonised long and hard about changing the title from "The Journey" to "A Journey", apparently.

There must be more appropriate titles they could have come up with.

God, I'd forgotten all about that thread. So they've hung on for six months (well, let's be generous, three months since the election) before publishing just to coincide with the Labour Leadership voting?

courtesy of Al Franken:

Lies and the Lying Liar who tells them

"Love me or hate me, I can't be ignored".

To paraphrase The Sun editorial yesterday. He couldn't be ignored because he was complaining about the 50% tax rate. Had he been talking about joining the Euro he might not have been granted this courtesy.

I like Rogin's idea. If getting rid of Clause 4 was a way of "signalling we've changed", kicking out Blair would do the same job.

I'm afraid that whenever I put my mind to this, It keeps coming up with suggestions that are too foul even for the internet.

Some rubbish about how Blair was happy to hand over to Brown after 2 terms, provided Brown did what he wanted to do anyway. He's the Ray Illingworth of politics.

An interesting chart from the Economist:

In defense of the publishing timing, this time of year is the busiest time annually for book publishing. I actually believe the claims that it would be a nightmare to re-arrange an internationally synchronized release of the book - it seems Random House kept a really tight grip on this (perhaps after an early issue of Mrs Bush's autobiography were sold in advance whilst on exclusive exerpts).

Those book sales are very surprising - I know that Prime Minister's autobiographies are notoriously poor sellers, and Blair's 4 million advance absurd in nearly any context anyway. Given the way Clark's diaries are spoken of, it is surprising that so few sold. Some crazy Clinton love going on there.

How about "scum-sucking murderous cunt tells yet more lies and tries to buy himself a less awful reputation"?

John Major's autobiography is quite good.

Who on earth bought all those Betty Boothroyds?

Alan Clark's diaries would be much higher if the table didn't start 4 years after they were published.

TT, I think (hope) Blair might have bought himself an even worse reputation with the borderline-mental defiance he appears to be showing in this book. His only regrets about Labour policy when he was in power appear to be about good policies (FOI, the foxhunting ban), and he appears to wholeheartedly support the Conservative party's current policies.

And, of course, it's an attempt to intervene in the Labour leadership election. We're not just talking publishing schedules here, we're talking about the reverent, lengthy, over-promoted interview programme he's been doing with yer Marrs and Kettles. This is an entirely calculated and cynical strategy.

What an unredeemable cunt he is.

'Pride and Prejudice'
'Nonsense and Insensibility'

Haha, I've done that in Waterstones - put the bible in the fiction section.

I saw most of his interview on BBC. Unfortunately, I don't know who the interviewer was.

I was impressed with the interview. Whoever it was asked the right questions in a way that forced Blair to give as honest an answer as he is capable of. We'd never get that here. The only tv journalists that good are on PBS and nobody of his stature would flog a book on PBS, except maybe On Charlie Rose. Maybe. But that would be a mostly well-educated, liberal audience. In my imagination, so it can't make much of a difference. Everyone watches the BBC. But maybe Blair will do the Charlie Rose show, because the sort of people who watch that are the ones he needs to convince if his reputation is ever going to be rehabilitated.



I was actually impressed by Blair too. He is, at the end of the day, a lying murderous cunt, but your lying murderous cunts are way better than ours. At least he seemed to understand what the real issues are and why people disagree with him. I'm not sure even Obama would be able - given our poisonous media culture - to be so apprently even-handed, because he'd be called "weak." And George Bush doesn't even grasp the basic concepts.

Indeed, I'd trade what we've got, even with Obama, for your parliament, David Cameron and all, in a fucking heartbeat.

Chris Mullen, no friend, said the book was surprisingly good. He suggested that apart from Iraq, where he was in denial, there was a reasonable attempt to set out issues properly.

I would find the book unbearable, I'm sure. Not just Iraq, but because he deliberately put himself in everyone's face all the time. In lots of ways, clearly, he was far better than Major. But I wasn't fed up with Major in the same way, and enjoyed his book.

I'm with lenin's tomb on this one:


He has left his party in a wretched, miserable state, panhandling for votes from people whom its has previously shown contempt for. He has driven the country further and faster to the right than most of his predecessors. He has participated in the international adventurism and vandalism of the most right-wing American administration since WWII, with no regrets. And he has come back with his memoirs, his shitty self-serving redacted diatribe about his kampf, to remind us just exactly what it is about him that is so emetic. To his war crimes, he adds crimes against language and taste.

It is appropriate, perhaps, that one of the monsters of our age should communicate his de profundis to us in a style befitting the morning television chat show. The matey populism, the chattiness, and the familiar cliche-riddled inarticulacy, is surely the fitting idiom for a thoroughly modern serial killer. In another age, a moralist, Whig and Gladstonian imperialist of Blair's class would have adopted a manner of expression displaying the fruits of a classical education. Literature would have supplied the dominant tropes of even his extemporary remarks. Today, advertising and public relations are the supreme genres.

But there's something else - the discursive style suggests that Blair probably made use of a ghost writer who transcribed his waffling while the former premiere gurgled from the shower or expatiated from the back seat of a limo. Blair would deny this, and has complained that Robert Harris was a 'cheeky fuck' for suggesting that he was such a lightweight as to require a ghost-writer. A plausible alternative is that he used a team of monkeys with typewriters and some unfortunate editors had to piece together the smarmiest copy.

Reed John wrote:
I was actually impressed by Blair too. He is, at the end of the day, a lying murderous cunt, but your lying murderous cunts are way better than ours. At least he seemed to understand what the real issues are and why people disagree with him. I'm not sure even Obama would be able - given our poisonous media culture - to be so apprently even-handed, because he'd be called "weak." And George Bush doesn't even grasp the basic concepts.

Indeed, I'd trade what we've got, even with Obama, for your parliament, David Cameron and all, in a fucking heartbeat.

Not sure if I totally agree with the last part--but with Republicans gleefully imagining the increasing likelihood of a shutdown of the federal government next year, perhaps that wouldn't be a bad trade--but I agree with Reed's bigger point.

Blair "one of the monsters of our age"?

I'd say so, yes.