According to an article in The Telegraph, Tony Blair‘s memoir, A Journey, is under consideration for “the least coveted prize in literature”– The Bad Sex Prize, which is presented annually to the author who has done the worst job writing about sex. Previous winners include Sebastian Faulks and Philip Kerr.
Blair has been catapulted into contention on the strength of this passage: “That night she cradled me in her arms and soothed me; told me what I needed to be told; strengthened me. On that night of 12 May 1994, I needed that love Cherie gave me, selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength. I was an animal following my instinct…”
Other writers in the running include Martin Amis for The Pregnant Widow, Ian McEwan for Solar and Jonathan Franzen for Freedom.
In a less personal part of his memoir, where Blair discusses how his leadership was affected by the extramarital affairs of Deputy PM John Prescott and Foreign Secretary Deputy Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, he refers to the “free-bird” impulse to have affairs “to spring you from that prison of self-control”.
“Then there is the moment of encounter, so exciting, so naughty, so lacking in self-control,” Mr Blair writes. “Suddenly you are transported out of your world of intrigue and issues and endless machinations and the serious piled on the serious, and just put on a remote desert island of pleasure, out of it all, released, carefree. You become a different person, if only for an instant, until returned back to reality.” Many women, says Blair, find politicians attractive. “It’s a strange thing, politics and sex,” Mr Blair writes. “People have often said to me that power is a kind of aphrodisiac, and so women – politics still being male-dominated – would come on to politicians in a way they would never dream of with anyone else.”