Society
Invading your own privacy
Published 15 May 2008
Even the cheap allure of voyeurism has its limit, and I think we might have reached it
Obviously, I'd like to think of myself as the sort of person who would rather spend a spare hour reading a think-tank report than watching Celebrity Big Brother. The evidence has not, alas, always supported this. Given a choice between the latest Demos paper and a rerun of George Galloway's cat impersonation, there's really no contest, and that hilarious Marie Claire photo shoot at No 10 which captured Cherie Blair having her lipstick applied by Carole Caplin remains one of my comic highlights of the Blair years. Plainly, I'm as prurient as the next person.
But even the cheap allure of voyeurism has its limit, and I think we might have reached it. The serialisation of new post-Blair political memoirs has turned into such a carnival of disclosure that it's becoming quite difficult to absorb each fresh intimacy without starting to feel slightly ill.
Who'd have guessed that John Prescott's revelation of bulimia - which seemed genuinely startling little more than a month ago - would be just the start of it? Since then, we've eavesdropped on the deputy prime minister's confession of infidelity to his wife and witnessed the reunion of her illegitimate son with his long-lost GI father. Lord Levy, we have learned, quietly warned Blair against receiving any more "long massages" from Caplin. And now Cherie has trumped the lot of them, confiding not just the precise location - Balmoral - of her fourth child's conception, but the details of its amorous mechanics.
To avoid the "sheer embarrassment", Cherie writes, of royal maids unpacking "unmentionables" from her toiletry bag, she had left her "contraceptive equipment" at home. The plan, presumably, had been to abstain. But you know how it is. "As usual up there it had been bitterly cold," she reminds us, "and what with one thing and another . . ." Readers are invited to complete the sentence by using their imagination.
Nothing is left to that faculty, though, in her graphic account of giving birth, which left her with a "third-degree tear" and "blood all over the place" after "they yanked him out". In the context of such candour, the delicacy of euphemisms such as "contraceptive equipment" strikes a curiously coy note. Perhaps the former prime minister's wife considered her precise birth control method a private matter - and if so, who could blame her? An instinct for boundaries is normal. It's just that her choice of where to draw them seems idiosyncratic, to say the least.
It is consistent with the contradiction running through her memoir, which alternates between reckless revelation and maternal indignation. "I don't want Piers Morgan to have a big scoop over my body, thank you very much," she recalls hissing to Alastair Campbell. The sentiment would be perfectly understandable - were it not for the fact that, thanks to her memoir, she has now made it a big scoop for the Times instead. When she miscarried, she was horrified by her husband and Campbell's preoccupation with how to spin it: "I couldn't believe it. There I was bleeding, and they were talking about what their line was going to be to the press." But now here she is, talking us through the details herself.
The calculated trade of privacy for publicity was, of course, first perfected by her husband, who sold new Labour to the nation from the GMTV sofa by trading his family-man appeal for popular votes. Now it seems as if the new Labour memoirists are just repeating the transaction - only this time bartering personal secrets in exchange for sales. Politicians used to write memoirs because they wanted to set the record straight - and many still do. But the advent of the seven- or eight-figure advance now offers some an almost irresistible Faustian pact, and it's not surprising if they sign up to sell themselves.
The bigger surprise is how queasy it feels to be on the receiving end of their revelations. Who seriously wants to picture the Blairs in bed at Balmoral, keeping each other warm and getting carried away? Nick Clegg's tally of sexual partners was quite amusing, but now seems practically quaint. The latest memoirs have raised the disclosure bar so high that the next time Piers Morgan interviews the Liberal Democrat leader, he'll probably be expecting their names and favourite positions.
If there is anything to be learned from the publication of these vignettes, it is that unless we want David Cameron and his cabinet to be writing about their bowel movements by the time they're voted out of office, we should stop criticising Gordon Brown for being "too private".
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