Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books

Whenever I read about the teacup tempests brewed by top-dollar political memoirs and their promoters, I reach for the phrase "positional good". This handy economist's buzzword has less to do with what Cherie and Tony reportedly got up to in the chilly bedrooms of Balmoral than with the inability of most of us to stay at Balmoral at all. If royal invitations to the Highlands, like Man Utd season tickets or Covent Garden boxes, count as high-status goods in permanently short supply that not everyone can share, however rich we grow, then so does a prime slot for a heavily-hyped non-fiction book on a corporate publisher's list.

Even the most generous of publishers have limited time and cash to spend (or waste). Access to their premium service – complete with that crucial newspaper serial deal – can only ever be extended to a favoured few. Here lies the real objection to the score-settling trivia from Michael Levy, Cherie Blair and John Prescott now silting up the public prints and airwaves. These ephemeral squawks of ego, destined like their predecessors to bookshop death on arrival once pundits and readers have chewed over the juiciest filleted morsels, hog too much of the money and effort that more worthwhile works and authors should command.

Make this case to the sort of publishers who offer way over the odds for political (or showbiz) bitch-and-tells, and they may claim that the media storm can justify the gross advance, and even help support some classier books. That's seldom true at any time, and hardly ever now. The rates for serial deals paid by even the keenest players (the Mail and Times titles) have plunged. Bloomsbury waved farewell to a fortune with the unsellable David Blunkett diaries; how much will Cherie end up costing Little, Brown? As ever, we will never know which promising borderline books lost their chance of high-profile publication in order to pay for these long-running Westminster follies.

The real reason that conglomerate publishers squander six-figure sums on unread apologias by unloved public figures is because they adore the whiff of power. Corporate animals themselves, they can nose their way around hierarchical packs, and like nothing better than to fawn over top dogs. These wallet-draining vanity ventures also flatter big-league publishers' self-image as a superior species of mover and shaker themselves.

Labour's snapping rabble have begun to bark as their tribe falls into a headlong decline. But rest assured that smart executives will now cultivate Team Cameron with all the tail-wagging zeal they can muster. Under Eddie Bell, at the Thatcher zenith, Murdoch's HarperCollins was the Tory party in print. Under Gail Rebuck, through Blair's glory days, Random House served the New Labour "project" faithfully. But both Prescott's (Headline) and Mrs Blair's (Little, Brown) confessions come out of literary stables owned by the French giant Hachette Livre, whose press confreres in the Lagardère empire have wielded their muscle to do favours for Nicolas Sarkozy – a close copain of Arnaud Lagardère himself. What if this big Parisian cheese, now ultimate boss of the largest book-publishing combine in Britain, ever hankers to interfere in our political and media life as well?

However, another group may well stamp its colophon on the Conservative 2010s. With Dylan Jones's volume of talks with the PM presumptive, Cameron on Cameron, due from its Fourth Estate imprint, and Boris Johnson firmly in the house, HarperCollins looks best placed to catch the blue tide again. Smaller, cannier publishers might still conclude that this advantage merely gives it a licence to burn money in the corporate grate.