I WAS once involved in loose discussions about ghost-writing the autobiography of a 1970s rock star. Although nothing ever came of the project, I was present at a meeting with a literary agent, at which the inevitable topic of money came up.

Everything depended on how many beans the subject, who was a huge name back in the day, was willing to spill. On the agent’s reckoning, a certain level of sales to those who were teenagers at the time seemed all but guaranteed, so even the blandest of memoirs would probably fetch an advance of £30,000.

But had the guy in question had been will been willing to reveal all – the underage groupies, the drugs, the fights on the tour bus – the bidding would have opened at around £100k and might even have gone far higher, with me on for a tasty percentage. Sadly, he opted for discretion, and that in the end was that.

By contrast, Tony Blair – if the wall-to-wall coverage accorded to publication of ‘A Journey’ today is anything to go by – appears to have opted for a fair degree of frankness in his memoirs. But are Random House getting the £4.5m-worth of frankness they are paying for?

That Blair long had Brown down as some sort of autistic spectrum dweeb, for instance, only confirms what everybody knew already anyway. Yet I seem to recall many denials that this was the case, which are now shown up as the fibs we all guessed they were.

I’m also amused by the former PM’s apparently belief that he was some kind of borderline alcoholic because he was partial to a quick livener prior to dinner, and then consumed half a bottle of wine with food. That would actually count as moderation for many of us.

Tippling at that level hardly takes you over the ludicrously low 21 units per week guideline, let alone provide you with the winning ticket in aesophagal cancer lottery unfortunately drawn by Christopher Hitchens. With the immense stress levels Blair must have faced, most of us would surely have been perpetually comatose.

Rather more seriously, the proclamation that he could not have foreseen the nightmare – and that’s his word – that unfolded in Iraq is entirely risible. Nobody of any intelligence, whether they supported the invasion of Iraq or not, could possibly have fallen for all that Rumsfeld guff about the occupation forces being welcomed as liberators.

Normally I wouldn’t bother with 715-pages of reminiscences from a retired politician, given that the genre is notorious for its soporific nature. I tend to prefer accounts by well-connected journos with a modicum of literary ability, if only because the picture they give is far less likely to be self-serving.

On that note, I can recommend Andrew Rawnsley’s ‘The End of the Party’, which I am about two-thirds of the way through. While the soft centrist viewpoint from which it is written is so designedly inoffensive that many leftists are bound to find it offensive, it clearly provides the benchmark by which all subsequent attempts to portray the second and third terms of New Labour in office will be measured.

I am mindful that Margaret Thatcher’s ‘The Downing Street Years’, which I got as a present, has sat largely unopened on my bookshelves since 1993, and probably should have gone to the charity shop ages ago.

But ‘A Journey’ does sound rather more enticing than Maggie’s bowdlerised ramblings. I may well buy it, or at least look out for it at Oxfam.