Tony Blair

Karl Rove's memoir, whose rights will be auctioned beginning today, should fetch around $3 million, according to an unnamed publisher who plans to bid on it and spoke to The New York Post's Keith Kelly.

That would be significantly less than memoirs by Tony Blair, Teddy Kennedy, and both Bill and Hillary Clinton, all of whom were represented, like Mr. Rove, by Washington uber-lawyer/agent Bob Barnett.

The publisher says Mr. Rove is "moving beyond the cliches," though there was little evidence of that in Mr. Rove's first column for Newsweek.

“This is a work of fiction,” says the bold type on the copyright page of Robert Harris’ The Ghost. Yeah, right.  read more »

Knopf has won the rights to publish Tony Blair's memoirs, a Random House source said. The Blair book was the subject of an intense auction; D.C. lawyer and literary agent Robert Barnett represented Mr. Blair, and has also represented both Bill Clinton and Alan Greenspan. No word yet on the Blair advance, but we'll update you.

UPDATE: A press release from Random House announcing the deal went out this afternoon. UK rights for the book went to Hutchinson, which is part of the Random House Group.

In an interview this afternoon, Knopf editor Ash Green said he was surprised that Knopf prevailed in the auction.

“I thought Rupert Murdoch would get it,” he said. “Because Murdoch for ten years supported Blair through his newspapers, and he has the Sunday Times first serialization, and he has HarperCollins, that seemed to be a natural fit. Our English cousins have strong connections to Blair, but I didn’t think they quite equaled... I think there was some wonder here whether the agent was using us as a stalking horse to get Murdoch’s price up."

Rumors of a return to trans-Atlantic harmony are premature for the moment.  read more »

Here's a clip from the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner last night, in which Cardinal Egan cracks a joke about Eliot Spitzer and his driver's license policy.

But the most humbling thing Spitzer heard last night was the reaction he got from the more than 1,000 guests at the black-tie event in the Waldorf Astoria. Right after Michael Bloomberg received a thunderous greeting from the audience, Spitzer walked on stage to a noticeably less enthusiastic reception.

"It reflects the popularity of Bloomberg" said attendee Vincent Sciarrillo, a senior VP of Emigrant Bank, "and it reflects the, how would you say, the feelings that perhaps Spitzer has not behaved as he should as governor."

"It was obvious the mayor was well-liked and Spitzer is not well-liked," said retired NYPD detective Maria Fitzgerald of Long Beach, Long Island, who said she was related to Tony Blair, the night's featured guest (Fitzgerald said her great-grandmother and Blair's great-grandmother were sisters). "Spitzer is clueless." she said.

It was long known that Alastair Campbell was keeping a diary; he used to boast to friends that it would make him more money than a best-selling thriller.  read more »

Meanwhile, speaking of Tony Blair, Steve Kornacki's take on the PM's last day is here.   read more »

No matter how clever the producers, it really is impossible to replace the most compelling character on a good television show without missing a beat.  read more »

Requests for a one-word answer from a politician seldom meet with success.

But Gordon Brown, who on June 27 replaced Tony Blair as the United Kingdom’s prime minister, stepped up to the plate in that morning’s London Independent.

The newspaper, which has been particularly critical of British involvement in Iraq, had solicited questions from its readers to put to Mr. Brown on the first day of his premiership.  read more »

His support of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq has left his career in tatters.  read more »

Stephen Frears’ The Queen, from a screenplay by Peter Morgan, turns out to be an unexpectedly subl  read more »

Stephen Frears’ The Queen, from a screenplay by Peter Morgan, turns out to be an unexpectedly  read more »

Marie Antoinette was loudly booed in Cannes. Well, why not?  read more »

How amazing that the Conservative Party leader in Britain, David Cameron, is now lashing out at American neoconservatives and denouncing Tony Blair's "slavish" relationship to the U.S. So the neocons are identified there with Labor. As they have found a home in the Lieberman/Hillary wing of the Democratic Party here.

We're all in for a realignment, and not as David Brooks has stated, of warmongering elites versus populist isolationists. This realignment is about how to handle the Arab world, how to handle autocratic Syria as it tries to put a damper on Islamic fervor, how to handle the Israeli occupation, how to put down weapons, how—as Tom Kean emphasized at the National Press Club yesterday—to win hearts and minds.

On Sept.  read more »

We're pathetic. Brian Williams is in Africa for NBC Nightly News to report on the AIDS crisis and the focus of his piece is Bono of U2, his visit. What a great man he is, what an investment he's made in Africa. Act I. Bono in his black shirt and rockstar spectacles, thumbwrestling with an African child. Act II. Williams and British Treasury Minister Gordon Brown—whom Williams touts as the likely successor to Tony Blair—are standing around being lectured by the pierced and piercing Bono on the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism for starving Africans. Act III. Bono's black shirt now sweated through, he collapses on the plane, with just, Williams informs, three hours sleep.

This isn't about Bono. He's a good guy. More power to him. It's about Americans. Can we care about anything without a celebrity attached? Global Warming, brought to you by Al Gore. Literature, sponsored by Oprah. African Hunger, presented by Bono. And now George Clooney brings us—genocide.

Opportunistic political leaders caught on quick. Sept. 11 left the world awash in fear and anxiety.  read more »

As cataclysms go, it was indelibly British from start to finish.  read more »

As the U.S.  read more »

It used to be so easy to loathe the Brits who passed through customs at Kennedy Airport with their H  read more »

Sorry about the light posting over the last few days. We were on a secret Politicker mission in London, where we were reminded what real newspaper wars look like and how generally mild our politics are.

So if you're looking for a little distraction over the next couple of months, check out the British press. They're gearing up for an unexpectedly tight race between Tony Blair's Labour and a Conservative Party under Michael Howard.

And the whole thing is looking, well, kind of medieval. The big Tory push last weekend was that perennial favorite: Down With the Gypsies!, a cause toward which they were steered by Rupert Murdoch's Sun.

Labour, meanwhile, is crippled by the fact that the unpopular Blair and his more popular Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, despise each other and seem to spend most of their time speaking to friendly reporters about their rivalry.  read more »

We can only hope it gets this lively over here. (Note to Col Allan: Do we have any Gypsies?)

Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader, by Philip Stephens. Viking, 288 pages, $25.95.  read more »

In sandals and open shirts, with earrings, poor posture, black jeans and mumbling plummy accents, a  read more »

It seems inexplicable.  read more »

As British Prime Minister Tony Blair stood before Parliament on March 18 to make the case for war wi  read more »

Iraq has already cost Tony Blair his premiership.  read more »

The question before the world is not whether Iraq should be disarmed, but under what auspices, in wh  read more »

It used to be so easy to loathe the Brits who passed through customs at Kennedy Airport with their H  read more »

It used to be so easy to loathe the Brits who passed throughcustoms at Kennedy Airport with their H1  read more »

For Norman Birnbaum, capitalism is all stick, no carrot.After Progress: American Social Reform and  read more »

I'm sorry to say this, but I've had it with meaningless public apologies.  read more »

LONDON–It is by no means certain that the humiliation inflicted on Tony Blair and his party by Eng  read more »

The return of the Clinton scandals brings back, among other things, the character issue.  read more »

With the publication of New Yorker editor Tina Brown's description of the White House dinner dance f  read more »

LONDON-Tony Blair's modernizing project has yet to arrive at the doors of 10 Downing Street, where h  read more »