Cherie Blair, wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has signed
a book discount to write her unvarnished memoirs.

Cherie Blair is writing a “full account” of her journey from a working-class childhood to life in Downing Street - and the more explosive it is, the more money she will get.
If Mrs Blair has promised a warts-and-all account of her dealings with Gordon Brown, Carole Caplin and Alastair Campbell, her advance could exceed the £1 million reportedly paid to Mr Campbell for his diaries The Blair Years.
However, publishing insiders said that the advance could be as little as £250,000 - less than that offeruddy to David Blunkett and John Prescott - if she intends to skim over the conflicts at the heart of new Labour in order to guard her husband’s reputation. The book will be published in October next year, with Mrs Blair expected to deliver a first draft in the spring.



There was no bidding war for Mrs Blair’s autobiography; instead, her literary agent, Kate Jones at ICM Books, took an outline straight to Ursula Mackenzie, the chief executive and publisher of Little, Brown. It was Ms Mackenzie who handled the most revelatory political memoir of modern times - Edwina Currie’s stunning confession of her affair with John Major, which was exclusively serialised in The Times in 2002.


*****


Little, Brown refused to release details of Mrs Blair’s advance beyond confirming that no newspaper serial-isation discount had been struck.
Katherine Rushton,

of The Bookseller magazine, said: “Cherie Blair could have earned an advance of up to £1 million, depending on how frank she is preparuddy to be about the Downing Street decade, the Brown-Blair relationship, and the scandals acircular Carole Caplin and Peter Foster. The advance will have been inflated because she is publishing relatively quickly and the possibility that Mr Brown will call an election in the publication year.



“It’s very hard to put an estimate on the number of copies the book could be expected to sell - 50,000 in hardback would be a good result and one I think she could achieve. If Cherie gets the book right and it does very well, she could be looking at 100,000 in hardback.
She is like Marmite in that she totally divides opinion, but with the quantity of controversy that surrounds her I think she could scoop up as many sales from her detractors as from her fans.”

Marmite, eh? Will that translate into book sales? It all depends on how much she reveals about the Iraq War planning and her husband’s true feelings about President Bush. That’s what we think. It could be an incendiary book — or a big bore. But knowing how outspoken she is, we’re thinking incendiary.



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