Yikes, the memoirs from hell

Get ready to laugh your lungs out or cringe with horror (depends on how you see it). Cherie Blair is out with biography which has hysterical romantic details about her life with good ol’ Tony. Here is what a Guardian blog says about it.

"Perhaps it was the smell of his skin ... the penetrating blue eyes, penetrating because they seemed to see right through me, to the extent that I could feel a blush rise up from some unchartered part of me ..."

This is not, as you could be forgiven for thinking, an extract from a Mills and Boon novel, but the latest snippet from Cherie Blair's autobiography. And, yes, she is talking about Tony.

The former prime minister's wife has been dishing the dirt on life at No 10 all week as her memoir is serialised in the ‘Times’ and ‘the Sun’. We've learned that Tony used her miscarriage to detract from public panic over Iraq, how she didn't get on with some of the royals, the extent of her rift with Alastair Campbell and how Tony's "heart sank" when the two of them learned that George Bush had been elected US president.

But the latest revelations that she had the hots for her husband when they first met have lifted a lid on an area of political life that many of us would rather she had kept shut. It is almost as bad as hearing your own mother discussing her sex life with Dad - we know it goes on, but really, we don't need to know the details.

"I began to realise that he was a very good-looking young man, tall and slim, yet broad in the shoulders. A really strong body," she gushes. Breathlessly, no doubt, with a heaving bosom.

Readers of a nervous disposition should look away now: Cherie goes on to tell us that they've "done it", although whether this is on the top deck of a bus unclear.

"Tony and I took the bus ... It was a double-decker and we went upstairs. It was completely empty and by the time we got off we knew each other better than when we'd got on. And even better the next morning."

The words "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" are missing at the end of the last sentence, but we get the idea.

Mrs Blair is unlikely to win the upcoming Orange Prize for her autobiography, but we'd like to suggest she enters for another literary gong: the Bad Sex award.

The Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award is given every winter to the author who produces the worst description of a sex scene in a novel.

Surely Cherie's a shoo-in with her spreading blushes from unchartered territory? Uncharted, that is, until she jumps on the number 74 with Tony.

Unfortunately, the former PM's lust-crazed wife doesn't grow out of her consuming passion as she ages: "I fancied him rotten and still do," she insists on telling us. But thankfully she has become slightly more demure in her later years.

Her description of Leo's conception at Balmoral on a royal visit is positively prudish compared to the torrid Tony she describes earlier. "As usual up there, it had been bitterly cold, and what with one thing and another ... "

What? No strong-bodied, slim-hipped night of abandon? Cherie, this is not going to win you the Bad Sex award. No wonder WHSmith is already selling your autobiography at half price only hours after it has gone on sale.

Although for the same price, you could pick up a couple of Mills and Boon novels. Would we really be able to tell the difference?

-----

Well, if you ask me, one would be able to tell the difference, at least the hero and heroine in Mills and Boon would certainly be better looking and younger than Tony and Cherie.