Tony Blair reportedly will receive $9 million advance for his memoir
Tony Blair, the former prime minister of Britain, has agreed to sell his memoir for an advance of about $9 million, according to a person with knowledge of the negotiations.
After a four-day auction, the book was bought by two divisions of Random House, Alfred A. Knopf in the United States and Canada, and Hutchinson in Britain.
Sonny Mehta, chairman and editor in chief of Knopf, said that Blair intended to write a “serious and frank book” about his life and in particular his decade at 10 Downing Street.
Blair, 54, won three consecutive elections for the Labour Party, starting with a landslide victory in 1997. He ended his 10-year tenure in June, having seen his popularity plummet because of his support for President George W. Bush and the war in Iraq.
He also had a close relationship with former President Bill Clinton and played a role, dramatized in the movie “The Queen,” in persuading Queen Elizabeth II to return to London and address the nation after the death of Diana, princess of Wales.
“I hope my memoirs will provide a serious and thoughtful, but also entertaining, reflection on my time as a member of Parliament and as prime minister,” Blair said in a statement.
According to Mehta, the book will be published simultaneously in Britain and the United States, but that publication is a few years away. Matthew Doyle, a spokesman for Blair, said that he had not yet “put pen to paper.”
Mehta, who declined to comment on the size of the advance, said he was confident that Blair could write a book that would sell at least as well as “The Downing Street Years,” the memoir of the former British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, which was on The New York Times best-seller list for several weeks in 1993 and 1994.
“There have been a handful of international statesmen over the past few decades who have had such a dramatic position on the global stage, and he is really among them,” Mehta said.
Blairs advance would appear to rank second only to the more than $10 million reportedly paid to Clinton for his memoir, “My Life,” published in June 2004, also by Knopf and Hutchinson.
According to people with knowledge of the negotiations for Clintons book, there was no auction in the United States because Clinton said he wanted Knopf to publish the book.
Blairs advance also appears to top the more than $8.5 million paid to Alan Greenspan, the former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman, whose book “The Age of Turbulence” is currently a New York Times hardcover nonfiction best seller.
