NOT A GOOD READ

Today I had a four-hour round trip into Manchester for a meeting of Mayors For Peace - which our council is signed up to. To while away the journey I took with me a birthday present - Cherie Blair's autobiography. Yes, he does have an extremely sharp sense of humour. ......
Actually, Cherie and I share one thing. A working-class, Catholic childhood in roughly the same era and fierce ambition academically. To that extent, I empathised with her . In fact, the first 100 pages were rather interesting . From then on in, my heart was sinking.
Aside from the rather prurient details of her sex life ( isn't three boyfriends at once rather greedy?) it is politics-lite with page after page of detail about hers and Tony's ambitions to be top of their particular trees. And of course much denunciation of "lunatic lefties. "
Oddly, though, the undoubtedly left-wing Tony Benn was drafted in to help Cherie's Parliamentary ambitions in Thanet North but I suppose a high-profile politician was useful to the campaign.
Cherie also claims to having been a member of the Labour Co-ordinating Committee. Which sits rather uneasily with her claims to have always been a New Labour kind of person. Only Labour Party anoraks will know this but the LCC was in fact a Bennite organisation - I used to be a supporter. So quite what she was doing there one can only speculate.
There has always been a myth that Cherie was always somehow more "left" than her husband. From the contempt with which the Labour Left is treated in the book, it is clear that is not the case. In short, after getting halfway through, and deciding things can only get worse, I am abandoning it in favour of better reading material for my weekend away from Calder Valley. Where allegiance to New Labour ideology would undoubtedly have cost us the seat at the last General Election.