Aznar's Short-term Memoirs

Spain's former prime minister appears to have broken some kind of political record by releasing the considered account of his time leading one of the largest nations in Europe while the chair of office still bears his imprint. José María Aznar's successor, José Luís Rodriguez Zapatero, was sworn in just over a fortnight ago.

At least no one can accusing Aznar of cashing in. When his party lost the general election, he was hardly an esteemed figure. Amid accusations he had misled the public over the Madrid train bombs, his ruling People's Party lost its lead in the polls and the chance of a third consecutive term in office to the socialists.

Many voters appeared outraged that their prime minister had continued to blame the armed Basque separatists Eta in defiance of the growing evidence that Islamist bombers had struck inside Europe. So this would not be the best time for him to release his memoirs, you may imagine. But you, it is safe to assume, are not Mr Aznar.

Compare him with a contemporary, the former US president. Bill Clinton is guaranteed a huge audience for his memoirs, but the book is still not finished. It was originally intended to have been published around the same time as Hillary's - presumably to convince the rightest of rightwing Americans that the devil had taken charge of the bestseller lists.

But that never happened. Bill had other things to do. (His wife, meanwhile, sat in the US Senate.) He now says he is writing flat out to finish the book, called My Life, which is due out at the end of next month. "I'm working around the clock ... and I'm killing myself because I want it done," he told Vanity Fair this month. "It was hard enough to live my life the first time. The second has been really tough."

His publisher is said to be "despairing", and his editor, Robert Gottlieb, has reportedly started sleeping at the former president's home to help him complete the book.

There are clear differences between the two men's literary methods and perhaps their entire outlooks on life. Mr Aznar is a former regional tax inspector who clung doggedly to his moustache through eight years in office; Mr Clinton we all know about.

There is, moreover, an element of choreography in the Aznar publication: he knew he was stepping down and had appointed a successor, who is now the opposition leader.

Perhaps more unusually, his wife had her own book out a few weeks ago. Called My Eight Years in the Moncloa (the Spanish equivalent of Downing Street), it is billed as the first memoir by a Spanish prime minister's wife and an honest and involved day-to-day account of her life.

It takes in the kidnap and murder of the Basque councillor Miguel Angel Blanco, the capsizing of the Prestige oil tanker, her daughter's wedding and the controversial support Spain gave to the war in Iraq. It is currently No 1 in the nonfiction charts of Casa del Libro, one of the country's biggest book chains.

Whether Mr Aznar's book sells as well as his wife's so soon after a large number of his supposed supporters failed to back his party at the polls remains to be seen. Maybe the business plan dictates it is best to strike now, while the Aznar name still has some currency, whatever that may be.

Joel Rickett, deputy editor of the Bookseller, identifies three types of political memoirs that publishers the world over try to sell.

First come the plain good books, such as the Alan Clark diaries and those by politicians regarded with some affection - shorthand for Tony Benn.

Second are the memoirs of the biggest of the big names - the cream of former prime ministers and presidents, who need write only about their time in office in order to get sales.

Third come the lower-ranking people who can supply a couple of revelations or - as in Robin Cook's case - a trenchant criticism of the government that will make news. The hope here is that sales or revenue will be driven by newspaper serialisation.

"Going even further down, you get Edwina Currie, where there was one single revelation," Rickett explains. "But that is a classic example of a political memoir that was exhausted by the serialisation: everyone thought they knew what was in it, there was nothing left, and it just sort of died."

Currie's book sold fewer than 10,000 copies. For those who categorise these things, it joins Norman Lamont's in the ranks of political memoirs we would really rather forget. See also Fowler, Norman.

But political memoirs can make business sense. Margaret Thatcher's two volumes, John Major's unexpectedly good read and the Hillary Clinton book were all genuine bestsellers.

Rickett maintains politicians can still get decent advances - Cook got £250,000 - compared with other public figures, even if publishers go for newspaper-led sales in the first few weeks at the expense of literary longevity.

The Bush-at-war sub-genre, a school led by journalist Bob Woodward and bulked up by the more acerbic insider accounts of Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill, is having a good 2004 and injecting new life into the political tome.

Revelations from the Clinton and Aznar books could nevertheless be thin on the ground.

The former Spanish PM has (sort of) made waves with an admission that he may have been distracted by his fight with Eta from the threat posed by Islamist militants.

"Spanish public opinion was not perhaps not sufficiently aware, until March 11, of the extent of the threat of Islamic terrorism," he writes in Eight Years of Government: A Personal View of Spain. "The government undoubtedly has to bear a responsibility. Perhaps the very successes achieved in the fight against Eta in recent years led us to lower our guard against the fundamentalist threat."

It is neither a shocking insider's account nor on a par with Edwina Currie's description of how she and John Major took time out of the chamber for closed-door sessions

We can expect little more from Mr Clinton's My Life. Those who have seen the manuscript and have spoken to the press say the former president feels loth to take responsibility for the genocide in Rwanda, and attacks what he believes is his "misrepresentation" by the press.

One "friend" who spoke to Vanity Fair for the Clinton article said he was using the book as an opportunity to set the record straight. Despite this, there is little on the Lewinsky scandal, which came close to bringing down his presidency. Some enterprising bookshop should put My Life on special offer with the Starr report.

Iain Dale, head of internet bookshop Politicos, says it is ultimately a thirst for knowledge that drives political book sales.

Biographies of Tony Blair were in demand when he became first Labour leader and then prime minister, and the same would probably be now true for the Conservative leader, Michael Howard, if the books were there.

But he detects a gulf in the British and continental European markets for political autobiographies. This, he says, is expressed in a greater interest overseas in politicians for their own sakes. Hence the success in France of François Mitterrand's The Wheat and the Chaff.

"You can sell a lot of copies without there being a lot in them," Dale says. "Helmut Kohl's has been an astonishing bestseller in Germany yet there isn't actually anything new in it. There is still, I think, a less cynical attitude to political memoirs in other countries than you find here."

Mr Clinton's and Mr Aznar's aside, now is not a golden time for political memoirs. Clare Short has yet to publish - though there is talk that her peak time may have passed - and Tim Renton, Tory chief whip at the end of the Thatcher era, is one for the summer. Enough said.

Of course, the memoir we are all waiting for is Alastair Campbell's, the one we got an expletive-heavy taste of during the Hutton inquiry. But will we want the book more the longer we have to wait? Dale is not so sure.

"Campbell has got to be very careful because the longer he leaves his diaries, a) the less he's going to get for them, and b) the less interest there is going to be in them," he says. "I don't think he has made a publishing deal, but if he wants to, he'd better get on with it."

Mr Aznar could have had the right idea. Unless you are the most powerful man in the world, there is perhaps merit in getting your book out while the readers still care.