IT IS easy to tell when the long tottering empire is about to slide into final collapse. The problem is no longer the conqueror at the gates but the traitors within. The eunuchs and the viziers realise they are all soon going to die anyway, so it is
much better for them to settle their own scores than to leave that pleasure to the enemy. Blood spreads over the marble floors.
It is a pattern that has been infinitely repeated, most lately in the extraordinary spate this spring of political memoirs from the inner sanctum of New Labour, a number of them brought forward from publication originally planned for the autumn: the authors must know something we don't. They are a fitting memorial to the project Tony Blair started 11 years ago. I say this only because they are so sorry.
Some kindly civil servant ought to issue advice to politicians on their retirement from office telling them their recollections of it are unlikely to be of any long-term significance. I specify long-term, because in the short term there may well be some personal satisfaction to gain from refighting old battles they had either lost or drawn while in power.
But as the immediate context that made the battles relevant vanishes into the mists of time, the recollections just become boring. If by some chance you were invited round to dinner at the £4m home in Belgravia to listen to Cherie recounting in person what she has written in her book: "Then she said to me, then I said to her, then she said to him, then he said to me…" – well, the point would soon come when you stared hard at your watch and excused yourself on the grounds of a long day ahead tomorrow.
There is a little amusement to be drawn from marking the difference between what the public figure thinks important and what may tickle the reader. The reader will skip through the solemn discussions of policies which never worked anyway and look for the juicy bits – John Prescott's adultery and bulimia, or how wee Leo, the Blairs' fourth child, was conceived at Balmoral. This came about because the royal servants unpack absolutely everything for the arriving guests, and for Cherie that meant even the contraceptives tucked away in her bathroom kit had been laid out ready for use on a previous visit. Out of embarrassment (surely misplaced in Cool Britannia, and anyway, I bet the royal servants have witnessed a good deal more sex than Cherie has) she stopped packing the contraceptives – and hey presto! Well, I never.
No doubt these personalities of yesteryear have been encouraged by their rapacious agents and publishers in London to put in as many juicy bits as possible, if only for some justification of the six or seven-figure advances being paid. The harvest is on the whole meagre. It is sad but true that, in the modern political system, politicians cease to be human beings and become mere automata conditioned to operate that system. If they balk at it from personal inclination then there are enforcers around – under New Labour, Alastair Campbell and Anji Hunter – to make sure of their conformity anyway. Those two in particular appear in all these recent memoirs as loathsome monsters, concerned only with reasons of state, not in any degree with personal feelings. But that is what they were paid for, and it is unlikely New Labour would have lasted so long without them.
The most pathetic figures are those courtiers too dazzled by all this for their own good, like Lord Levy, the fundraiser hung out to dry in the witch-hunt last year against dodgy donations. He was ill-suited for life at the top after a cosy Jewish upbringing in East London, from which he escaped by becoming a pop impresario and making a lot of money. All unwitting, he prepared himself for intimacy with a shallow and philistine Blair uncomfortable in his skin as privileged product of Fettes and Oxford, and therefore susceptible to people like Levy who were as non-establishment as could be. The surpassing folly was that Blair not only took his money but also sent him as a special envoy to the Middle East. Those who live by patronage die by patronage, and Lord Levy can spend the rest of life reflecting on his fall from grace.
Nobody in 10 years' time is going to remember Levy, least of all on account of his tedious book. In the end, he and the present crop of his fellow authors are going to be disappointed of everything but the advances they have received. Politicians write memoirs not in order to gain some objective sense of what their lives and careers have been about, but in order to justify and, if possible, immortalise themselves. I can say as a practising historian that most of these personal accounts are useless to me in constructing broader narratives of the past, except insofar as they can usefully be set against alternative or conflicting accounts. But often they cannot: they are too self-serving. They are doomed to oblivion, along with most of their authors.
• A Question Of Honour by Lord Levy and Speaking For Myself by Cherie Blair are available now; My Story: Pulling No Punches by John Prescott, is published May 29
The full article contains 920 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
