Why are political memoirs so mediocre?

The writer is author of ‘Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History’

The publication of Angela Merkel’s memoir, Freedom, should be significant: the former German chancellor’s political career has been one of the most noteworthy of the 21st century. Yet reviews imply there is little in the 720 pages to enlighten us. The Financial Times judged it “a tame affair”. “The dullness of her political utterances is faithfully reproduced,” wrote The Observer. Foreign Policy claimed: “It has all the hallmarks of a ghostwritten narrative, ironed out incessantly to remove any creases, thereby removing passion.”

Stodgy prose may not be surprising given Merkel’s legendary continence. But almost all political memoirs are mediocre books. Despite the generous advances publishers dole out to them, politicians are fundamentally unsuited to the genre. The best memoirs rely on authors reckoning honestly with themselves in ways that are painful and exposing. Even leaving aside the most infamous liars, most politicians spend their careers avoiding profound human truths — including their own.

Political leaders are instead incentivised to gloss veneers of success over failure and brush off a jibe when others might deck the heckler (the late Lord John Prescott was an exception). Their natural instinct is to filibuster their way up to the word count with puffs of self-justification.

Tony Blair’s A Journey continued to justify his decision to invade Iraq. His claim to have wept for dead Iraqi civilians and British soldiers, addressed rather defensively to their families, was described by one bereaved father as “crocodile tears”.

Monica Lewinsky criticised Bill Clinton’s My Life for what she considered an inaccurate account of their relationship: “He could have made it right with the book,” she said. “But he hasn’t. He is a revisionist of history. He has lied.” Twenty years later, in his new memoir Citizen, Clinton claimed to feel bad, but admitted he had still not apologised to Lewinsky. 

One of the most tragic political memoirs is Anthony Eden’s Full Circle, in which three years after the Suez crisis of 1956 he denied his government had colluded with Israel, blamed the US for his defeat and claimed the British public was on his side. Colleagues tried in vain to dissuade him from publishing this catalogue of untruths. The resulting book is a portrait of a man hopelessly disengaged from reality.

Not all political memoirs are dull. Winston Churchill won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his “mastery of historical and biographical description” as well as his oratory. He wrote about 18 memoirs (depending on how you count them), including six colossal volumes on the second world war. Churchill never said: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it,” but the sentiment rolls off his thousands of lyrically written pages. 

Churchill’s near-contemporary at Harrow School, Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote his An Autobiography in a British Indian prison, more than a decade before he became prime minister of independent India. It is among the finest political memoirs: witty, intimate, searingly self-critical.

Perhaps it is easier for politicians to write revealingly before they achieve high office and the stakes rise. Barack Obama’s exquisite Dreams From My Father was published before he became a senator. Though candid, his post-presidential volume, A Promised Land, was inevitably more concerned with defining history than telling a personal story. It is pretty good as these things go, but the first book is unquestionably a better read.

Those who pick up Merkel’s Freedom may be bored. For readers of political memoirs, that will be a familiar sensation. Ultimately, however, when politicians write self-consciously and distantly, obscuring uncomfortable truths and justifying the unjustifiable, they may be showing us who they really are.