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.

THE "KISS AND TELL" GENE?

I have no intention of buying , or even browsing , Cherie Blair's awful tome, Speaking For Myself. But hands up I found myself in an idle moment today reading extracts on the internet and had a strange sense of deja vu.

Some years ago, a friend of mine came across Tony Booth's 1989 vintage autobiography, Stroll On, at a jumble sale.

And, largely as my paths have crossed with the Booth dynasty over the years (I once briefly worked for his third wife who was a journalist and he was a "regular" on the Manchester Evening News Diary pages) I did cast an eye over it in some detail. OK, I read it.

What was remarkable was the man's absolute lack of discretion about his private life. The book recalls with glee his "crumpeteering " days with stories of shinning up drainpipes, in and out of various women's beds, and lots of indulging in drunken sprees - one of which nearly killed him. This was pre-Blair days so not much mention of Cherie or his famous connections. That would come later in the hastily-cobbled together sequel, What's Left.

To be fair, when the book was originally written, Tony Booth was more famous than his daughter and he had never exactly pretended to be a saint.

However, it's quite extraordinary that his daughter seems compelled to earn a few extra pennies with graphic details of her first date with Tony, the completely unnecessary details of her contraceptive arrangements, and tittle-tattle about Gordon Brown. Will all this make the book a best-seller? Doubt it.

I would have thought a woman in her position would have a modicum of self-respect and not need to tout such rubbish. It is all, I'm afraid, tawdry, tacky stuff which reads just like a chip off the old block.......