Watch your back ... Tony Blair follows George Bush out of a White House press conference. Photograph: Charles Dharapaka/AP
News of Tony Blair's £5m book deal with Random House last week came as little surprise. Not only are political memoirs obscenely lucrative (Bill reputedly got a slick $10m advance for his) but once again, as we should expect by now, the architect of Cool Britannia has taken his cue from the American continent.
There's been something of a publishing frenzy among New World leaders of late. Penguin have just brought out former Mexican president Vicente Fox's memoirs, Fidel Castro's voluminous My Life hits the shelves this week, and even the notoriously media-wary President Bush co-operated with Texan journalist Robert Draper for Dead Certain; a history of the Bush presidency.
Comfortingly, all characters have so far acted true to form. Castro's "history" has been expertly stage managed, every page approved by the ageing dictator, with the final product released in a blaze of starry publicity. Of course it's shameless propaganda, but as always, executed with inimitable panache. As his biographer (or rather hagiographer) Ramonet puts it: "Few men have known the glory of entering the pages of both history and legend while they are still alive. Fidel is one of them."
Bush, by contrast, enters the annals in typically clunky, graceless fashion. Having trusted Robert Draper, a former writer for GQ and fellow Texan, to do him "justice", the result is certainly not what Bush nor any of his team would have scripted. While Draper is careful to provide balance, his account of the man once described as having been born with a "silver foot in his mouth" is far from flattering. It shows Bush living in a bubble, unable to recall crucial Iraq policy decisions or grasp the significance of Hurricane Katrina, and as someone who generally evinces a "petulant contempt for the outside word".
The beleaguered president may soon have even more reason to dislike this "outside world". Apparently the clincher of the Blair book deal was a promise to spill the beans on his controversial relationship with the US president.
We'll have to wait a couple of years for those revelations - but in between, just to whet our appetites, we have Cherie Blair's memoirs, on sale from October 2008. Publisher Little, Brown promises us a "warm, intimate and often very funny portrait of a family living in extraordinary circumstances". They've also promised Cherie a rumoured £1m - and, as it's already well known, she's never been one to pass up a good business opportunity.
