LONDON: There are tears and private anguish, ”maddening” frustration about Gordon Brown, intimate glimpses into the ”intriguing, surreal and utterly freaky” royal family and an earthy admiration for the ”clanking great balls” of his mercurial spin doctor, Alastair Campbell.
Alcohol, Tony Blair admits, often propped him up at the end of long, difficult days, while fornication – ”choosing the wrong woman, fatal in politics” – unravelled the careers of several cabinet colleagues.
The former British prime minister, author of the most widely anticipated political memoir in years, was not even in London yesterday as newspapers went into overdrive, mining the 718-page doorstopper for pervy nuggets and unknown gems.
The search for unforgettable vignettes proved fruitful: the ferociously anti-papist Ian Paisley asking Mr Blair (who converted to Catholicism after he left office) what God might think of a deal to seal the peace process in Northern Ireland; Prince Charles being told by the tyro PM that his mother must address the nation about the death of Princess Diana; a cancer-stricken Mo Mowlam, Mr Blair’s first Northern Ireland secretary, tugging off her wig and declaring she would rather be having sex than discussions in cabinet.
No extracts nor serialisation rights were sold before yesterday’s release of The Journey, sparking a frenzy of media competition and a ludicrous clutch of ”exclusive” banner headlines as papers jostled for commuters’ attention on newsstands and at railway stations.
According to the author’s foreword, the book – described by Amazon on the basis of pre-orders as one of the most successful political biographies of all time – is not a traditional memoir because that genre is rather too ”easy to put down”: ”There is only one person who can write an account of what it is like to be the human being at the centre of that history
