A politician writes ... but who really cares? ; ARTS There are too many political memoirs published. They may attract a blaze of publicity, but hardly anyone reads them

• Published in: Standard (London, England : 1981)
• Main Author: Sexton, David
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Evening Standard Limited 20.09.2004
• Edition: West End final ed.

AND almost every other subject is more rewarding. I once sat at lunch next to a political commentator on another paper (a former Tory member who had lost his seat in a sex scandal, I subsequently learned) and he immediately began to lecture me about various MPs and the latest developments in the House, as though there could be no more absorbing subject for any man. When I said that I was more interested in trilobites - they thrived on this planet for 300 million years and were extraordinarily various and beautiful, unlike MPs - he thought I was joking. Why, then, are bemused, bored and unenthused readers subjected to so much verbiage from politicians, forced upon their attention by the papers? The answer is embarrassing but unavoidable. It is this: the merest whiff of power excites. All of those who have participated in the feeding frenzy around, say, the publication of Cherie Blair and Cate Haste's Goldfish Bowl (not to mention William Hague's life of Pitt which has been mortifying Radio 4 listeners) have been stimulated by the scent of power. They are not thrilled by the book's scholarship, its prose style or even its disclosures (there never are any disclosures) but by mere proximity to the centre of political command. We can just turn the page and read as we will, about whatever we like, the diet that will render us lithe at last, say, or how to punctuate, the art of fugue, Romanesque architecture, the evolution of life, the Hundred Years War, new developments in neuroscience, the Khmers, the great literature of the past, tree cultivation, Palaeolithic art, the wines of Bordeaux Should we not instead be keeping up with our elected members as much as we can? Au contraire. "If only one could look on the present as an advance copy of the past!", Max Beerbohm exclaimed. With political memoirs, that's easily done.