The Blair rich project

Former British prime minister Tony Blair and his high-powered U.S. lawyer, Robert Barnett, will meet a gaggle of publishers in London in October to talk about his proposed memoirs. The British online publishing magazine, The Bookseller, reports that Random House, HarperCollins, Bloomsbury, and Simon & Schuster will bid for the book. Estimates for the price of the book -- the publisher's price, that is, not yours -- range from $2 to $16 million. That's quite a range. Apparently it will depend on how juicy and revelatory the proposed book is.

It's a strange thing how politicians immediately ring up the publishers when they leave office. It used to be that they published their memoirs years later -- as did Churchill, Eisenhower, and Truman. But now it seems they want to start arguing and justifying themselves, and settling scores, when their offices are barely cleaned out. Perhaps Blair has to do it now while his memory is still fresh. The Bookseller says he didn't keep a diary while in office.